Operating instructions

ATA (AT attachment) A type of hard drive and controller. ATA was designed
to replace the earlier ST506 and ESDI drives without requiring replacement of
the AT BIOS—hence, AT attachment. These drives are more popularly known
as IDE drives.The ATA/33 standard has drive transfer speeds up to 33 MBps; the
ATA/66 up to 66 MBps; the ATA/100 up to 100 MBps; and the ATA/133 up to
133 MBps. See also IDE and Ultra DMA.
ATAPI (ATA packet interface) A series of standards that enable mass storage
devices other than hard drives to use the IDE/ATA controllers. Extremely popu
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lar with CD-ROM drives and removable media drives like the Iomega Zip drive.
See also EIDE.
Athlon Name used for a popular series of CPUs manufactured by AMD.
ATTRIB.EXE A command used to view the specific properties of a file; can
also be used to modify or remove file properties, such as Read-Only,System,or
Archive.
ATX (AT eXtended) The popular motherboard form factor, which generally
replaced the AT form factor.
ATX12V A series of improvements to the original ATX standard for power
supplies, including extra power connections and an increase of the ATX P1
power connector size from 20 pins to 24 pins.
autodetection The process through which new disks are automatically recog
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nized by the BIOS.
AUTORUN.INF A file included on some CD-ROMs that automatically
launches a program or installation routine when the CD-ROM is inserted into a
CD-ROM drive.
Award Software Major producer of BIOS software for motherboards.
back up To save important data in a secondary location as a safety against loss
of the primary data.
backside bus The set of wires that connect the CPU to Level 2 cache. First ap
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pearing in the Pentium Pro, most modern CPUs have a special backside bus.
Some buses, such as that in the later Celeron processors (300A and beyond), run
at the full speed of the CPU, whereas others run at a fraction. Earlier Pentium
Passport / Mike Meyers‘ A+ Certification Passport / Meyers / 226308-3 / Glossary
8 MIKE MEYERS’ A+ CERTIFICATION PASSPORT
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