2011

100 Glossary
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PAL (Europe)
Phase Alternating Line, or PAL, is a process for color transmission for analog
TV that is primarily used in Europe, but also in Australia, South America, and
many African and Asian countries.
The image repetition rate for PAL is 25 Hz.
Partition
A hard drive's storage space can be divided up into several areas which can
be used as separate, independent hard drives. These areas are called
partitions. Every partition in Windows receives its own drive letter.
Hard drives may only be partitioned after being re-formatted, or cleaned of all
data.
Note: There are special programs, which can partition unformatted hard drives.
However, they do not guarantee that this happens without any data loss!
PCI bus
The PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) bus is a standardized bus
system, which supplies a PC with expansion cards.
PCI components are mostly self-configured, or plug-and-play enabled. The
main processor may quickly access the most important input and output
components (such as the sound card or network card) locally via the PCI bus.
Performance
Performance describes the capacity of the data processing system. A PC's
performance indicates the computational strength of the system or how much
memory is available. This is a relative value and serves to compare the system
to others.
Plug-in
Plug-ins are additional programs that expand the functionality of the main
program. They are inserted into the main program.
Process
A process is a running program. You may view all programs being run at the
time in the Task Manager. You will see many processes, even if no windows