Datasheet

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Part I: Preparations and Planning
drive, seeing as they are as unnecessary as an appendix to a cutting-edge PC running
Windows Vista. (A USB Flash drive is far superior in every way to the venerable
floppy.)
You need at least one hard drive. Today’s hard drives hold gigabytes (GB) of data
(that’s 1,000 megabytes), or even a terabyte (TB) of data (that’s 1,000 gigabytes). At
the time of this writing, typical hard drives range in capacity from 80GB to more than
1TB — and those figures are constantly rising, while costs are constantly dropping.
(You’ve gotta love that free-market competitive model!)
Buy as much data territory as possible. Chapter 7 is your guide to hard drives — and
there’s even a section on floppy drives.
The bells and whistles
Today’s multimedia PCs have almost more extras, add-ons, and fun doodads than
any mere mortal can afford (well, except for Bill Gates, that is). If you want to be
able to install and run today’s software, though, you need at least a DVD-ROM drive.
Multimedia applications and games also need a sound card (or built-in audio hardware
on your motherboard), along with a set of speakers or headphones. In Chapter 9, I tell
you more about DVD drives, and Chapter 10 has the skinny on PC sound cards.
Another common addition to a PC is a printer. If you need the lowdown on today’s
printer technology, jump to Chapter 13. If a high-speed cable or DSL Internet con-
nection is available in your area, you can jump on the Internet broadbandwagon.
(That’s so bad it doesn’t even qualify as a pun.) Otherwise, you can still use a dial-up
modem for connecting your computer to other computers across telephone lines,
especially if you’re an Internet junkie. (I cover modems in Chapter 11.)
In later chapters, I also discuss advanced stuff for power users, such as network
hardware and scanners. You don’t have to read those chapters, and you won’t be
tested on them. But they’re there in case you feel adventurous (or you really need
them).
Connecting Your Computer Components
You might be wondering how to connect all the various components that make up a
computer. “What happens if I connect something wrong? Am I going to light up like a
Christmas tree? Will I burn up an expensive part?”
I admit that when I built my first computer in the early 1990s, I had these same con-
cerns. To reassure you, consider these facts:
⻬
Most connectors for computer components are marked to help you plug
them in correctly.
In fact, some connectors are designed so that you can
install them in only one direction, with many using color to indicate where
they connect.
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