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Articles on Jobseekers Advice If you would like to submit an article to Jobseekers Advice, then please feel free to contact us. We are always looking for a wide range of articles dealing with career advice, CV advice, interview advice, working abroad, employment issues, education and training and other recruitment or careers related topics. The articles can be the result of professional experience or personal insight - we are looking to offer all points of view.
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Computer Basics 3 - Software? Hardware? by Scott Boyd OK, so far we have covered the basics of a system and insides of a PC. So now we are going to look at 2 components which make up our system - Hardware and Software.
The quick low down.... Hardware is anything you can touch - mouse, keyboard, monitor, process (although you shouldn't touch your process unless you know what you are doing!), etc.
Software is the programming that runs it all.
Hardware As said above, hardware refers to all the physical components of your PC, including Input and Output devices and internal components of the PC itself.
Well, there's not really much more to say on that. I just thought it was worth mentioning!
Software - Operating System The main piece of software on your PC is your Operating System (OS). Which for 90% of PC users will be a Microsoft product called Windows (which has different versions - 95, 98, 2000, NT and most recently, XP).
Microsoft Windows has a fairly bad reputation in the IT world for being pretty poor, but for novice users purposes, it's pretty simple and easy to use and fairly functional (and let's face it you don't care about the technical issues!).
If you are buying a new PC today, it should have Microsoft Windows XP installed on it at least (or whatever the latest OS is when you read this). Any store bought PCs will have their OS already installed.
What the OS does is:
Imagine the OS as being the customer service side of a shop. You see and deal with the well dressed and polite CS staff. And you don't have to look at the messy pit that they call a storeroom.
Software - Other stuff Your OS is only the basics of your PC - you need to add all the extras on it now! Some will come already installed on your PC (usually Microsoft Office Suite which includes Word, Access, Excel and Outlook).
Other pieces of software already installed on your PC are known as drivers. These are programmes that run specific things on your PC - for example your mouse has its own driver, as does your printer. If you add a new device (input or output), you may have to install a new driver for it (but to be honest, Windows is pretty good for that - it recognises new pieces of hardware automatically these days so you don't have to do anything!).
If you have to install software yourself (be it a driver or something you bought, like a computer game) then it is usually only a matter of inserting the CD into the CD drive and following a couple of instructions.
Rule of thumb for installing software: If you are asked a question and don't know the answer, then just choose the default option!
Summary Be it hardware or software, there is one golden rule. You don't need to know *how* it works, as long as it does.
****side note - you will want to do this, and I beg you now not to. You will be tempted to mess around with settings on your new PC. Don't. At least not until you know what you are doing. It's so easy to mess things up!
Regards Scott Boyd - Webmaster and Founder - Jobseekers Advice
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