PC Hardware Configuration

Here are my notes on each component in a PC. Good luck on your CompTIA A+ or other exam.

From the Cynic's Dictionary: STATE-OF-THE-ART = Soon-to-be-obsolete.

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Sound: Computer ready

User Ergonomics

• Your chair, such as Herman Miller's $700 Aeron Highly Adjustable Work Chair, should give constant back support as you tilt forward. Leaning forward is bad for your back. If you find yourself tilting forward, maybe it's really because you need a new presciption for your glasses. Elevating your feet (with a wood box or message unit) may keep you from tilting forward.
• The keyboard should be at the end of a level arm .
• Seat should be adjusted so legs bend in an upside-down “L” shape.
• Rest legs on an angled footrest. This keeps you from slumping over the keyboard. Try it!
• Arms and elbows should be supported by the chair.
• To avoid glare on screen and papers, position monitors away from windows and doors so you're facing the light source. Lighting is ideally from the left at an angle. Get bright daylight bulbs.
• Paper references within reach.

Get Green

• Get low-noise PC's from Endpcnoise.com
• Efficient power supplies convert 90% of their input power vs. 40% in conventional PSUs, largely to produce multiple 5V and 3.3V voltages (in addition to the standard 12V) that nowadays can be converted by voltage regulator modules on the motherboard.
• Power management software Surveyor by Verdiem centralizes power settings on remote computers.
• The 80Plus initiative by power companies promote this.

Shocking Electric Power:

• Prevent Electro-Static Discharge:
• work in a humidified non-carpeted area with rubber mats. Kinky!
• Drain static build-up by wearing a resistor wrist-strap connected to the chassis plugged into an earth-grounded AC wall outlet (except when working with open CRT tubes).
• Use anti-static spray of 1 part fabric softener (such as Downey) to 20 parts water.
• Keep equipment in anti-static bags.
• Handle boards only by their edges.
• Volts measure the potential (pressure) of a circuit. The 120V standard in America may vary from 114V to 126V. 240V is used for heavy electrical appliances. Electical transmission lines are 10,000V. A PC's power supply steps power down to 5v or 3.3v. AA cells are 1.5V each.

  Batteries are string cells together to achieve higher voltage.

  US car and marine batteries are traditionally rated at 12V AC. Applying higher voltage charges them. More voltage is needed during below-freezing tempuratures and to charge Delco Freedom (closed cell) batteries which run at 14.3 volts. So charge older batteries at 13+v, and up to 15v on new ones. So use a multi-meter before charging.

  Electricity is Volts x Amperes = Watts or Watts / Volts = Amps. So 400W / 120V = 3.3 amps

  Watts (120V)	Amps (Fuse)	Wire guage	Usage
  10W	--	--	Cell phones, MP3 players
  50W	--	--	Portable CD players
  90W	--	--	Laptop Computers
  100W	--	--	Video Game Consoles
  300W	--	--	TVs
  350W	--	--	Power Tools
  400W	3.3	--	--
  525W	--	--	Small Appliances
  800W	7	18	-
  1200W	10	16	Door bells
  1800W	15	14	Thermostats Lights
  2400W	20	12	Wall Sockets garbage disposal
  3600W	30	10	Water Heaters
  4800W	40	8	-
  6600W	55	6	Kitchen Range Wall oven Air Conditioner

• Watts is the unit of power, the rate at which a device consumes electricity (converts current to heat or motion). Electric bills are calculated based on Killowatts (thousands of watts) used each hour.
• Amperes (Amps for short) measure the amount of current (number of electrically charged electrons). Amps is used to rate circuits and fuses.

• When using a Digital multimeter (DMM):
  • Turn off power before testing for resistance (measured in ohms).
  • To read household current, set the selector to 200v AC
  • To readcontinuity on low-voltage door chimes, set the ACV scale to 50V.
  • connect the DMM in parallel to the part
  • the resistance of a good 15 amp fuse is zero.
• On the motherboard, black wires labeled P8 and P9 go next to each other on P1 and P2 males on the motherboard.
• To discharge a CRT anode, use a well-insulated long screwdriver.

• Regular Romex NM cable. If moisture is involed, use NMC cable.

  UPS Manufacturers

  APC

Hardware Compatibility:

PnP = Plug and Pray
1. Get a list of the installed hardware: Boot the computer with the NTHQ (NT Hardware Qualifier) diskette. for Intel processors only: If you don't have this program, first create it by running program Support\Hqtools\makedisk.bat from the NT Install CD ROM.
2. Make sure that the device is on Microsoft's Hardware Compatibility List Search According to the Winmag NT 4 Q&A Problem areas include scanners, some accelerated video drivers, non-standard pointing devices (particularly joysticks), low-end tape drives and multimedia upgrade kits.
3. To find who manufactured a card, lookup the FCC ID legally mandated on boards on the FCC web site. Anatek provides a massaged database for $7.
4. Get the most recent device drivers manufacturers NT 4.0 doesn't support Windows 95's VxD virtual device driver model. Win95 disk compressors, defragmenters, undelete, and other low-level utilties won't run on NT 4 because low-level disk support is different on the two platforms. NT 3.x video, SCSI, and printer drivers are incompatible with NT 4.0.
5. Sharkyextreme.com and HardwareCentral.

Microsoft's Plug and Play White Paper
Microsoft's Troubleshooting Tools and Strategies White Paper from the Windows 2000 Resource Kits
Using The Windows Control Panel
Finding Device Drivers that are Compatible with Windows 2000

PC Adapter Cards:

	Format	Data Path Bits	Data Transfer Speed MB/s	Mhz	Configuration
&nbap;	62 line PC-Bus	8/20	1		Jumpers
	62 & 36 pin PC-AT ISA	8 & 16	8	8 MHz	Jumpers
	MCA	16 or 32	20-40	10 MHz	IBM Reference Disk
	EISA 486 with 7 bus masters	32	33 - 100	6 - 10 Mhz
'92	VLB VESA Local Bus	32	150 - 275 burst mode	50 Mhz
'94	PCI	32 or 64	532	66	PnP 32-bit 124-pin or 68-bit 188-pin
'98	PCI Express	64/32	532	133 Mhz	Express Card
'98	PCI-X 2.0	64/32	1024	133 Mhz
'90	PCMCIA Type I Card 68-pin JEIDA connector standard.	8/16		54mm wide 3.3mm high
'91	PCMCIA Type II Card serial/parallel ports	8/16		5.0mm high
	PCMCIA Type III hard drives	8/16		10.5mm high
	USB 1.0 Bus	-		-
	USB 2.0 Bus	-		-

Intel E7221 Server chipset (Copper River) supports PCI-Express x8, which in turn supports a 64-bit PCI hub with built-in support for PCI-X slots at speeds up to 133MHz with PCI hot-plug replacement — used for high-performance SCSI arrays and very fast server-optimized network adapters. The E7221 also supports MCH integrates SVGA video, ECC RAS advanced memory error correction, and switches automatically from dual-channel to single-channel memory support if one memory channel (device) fails.

To view devices hidden when they are not connected in Windows 2000 Device Manager, select Show Hidden Devices or run

set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1

To have phantom devices always appear, add this Environment system variable

Complete Systems Manufacturers

Integrators

PC Motherboards

• NT support Intel's SMP Symmetric Multi Processing with up to 2 Intel Inside processors per workstation or 4 processors per server. SMP is not available with AMD K6, Cyrix/ IBM 6x86MX, or IDT Centaur processors.
• In this table, "Bus /Addr Bits" is the maximum bit size of the instructions that the processor can handle.

  Intro	Type	Bus /Addr Bits	Bus MHz	Speed MHz	Memory
  	IBM PC-XT 8088 Dual In-line IC
  	PC-AT	16/24	33-100		30 pin SIMM
  	EISA Bus 486	16	32 MB/s 33-100	32	30 pin SIMM
  	Pentium	32	60/66	60-133	72 pin SIMM
  	Pentium MMX cache on system board	32	60/66	100-233	168 pin DIMM
  	Pentium Pro with on-board 256/512 half-speed L2 cache in an external PGA and a separate cache bus	32	60/66	100-233	168 pin DIMM
  	"586" Pentium II 440BX chip Slot I cartridge with 512K L2 cache	64	100	233, 266, 333, 350, 400	168 pin DIMM
  	Pentium II .18µ Xeon chip Slot 2 2MB L2 cache	64	100	400,450	168 pin DIMM
  	"686" Pentium III i815 chipset	1.1GHz
  	AMD Athelon (requires 300 watt power supply)
  	Intel Celeron with 128K L2 on board full speed
  	Intel Rambus	Double 64		800
  	Intel Coppermine with 512K full speed L2
  '01	Intel Itanium I (from "Merced" project w/HP)	64	733-800
  '02	Intel's 3.6GHz Xeon ("McKinley") processor based on its IA-32 chip architecture	IA-64
  '03	AMD Opteron IA64 extensions to IA32	AMD64
  9/03	AMD Athlon IA64 extensions to IA32
  2/04	Intel .13µ P4 ("Madison, Deerfield") w/extensions to IA32	EMT64
  05	Intel ("Willamette")	IA-32	>1.4GHz

  Note: all computers wait at the same speed.

  Intel P4's have a new core and APIC bus multiprocessor protocol — 400MHz data transfer rate on the system bus for a bandwidth of 3.2GB/sec Chipsets for Socket 775 :

  Intel 925X Express chipset for workstations supports PCI-Express x16 (video) and x1 (general-purpose) slots, high-definition audio (7.1 speaker support), dual-channel DDR2 memory, USB 2.0 ports, Serial ATA and matrix storage.

  Motherboards are designed to support specific types of RAM.
  DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) is used as the main (or system memory) a PC uses to store the operating system, application programs, and data while they are running.

  DRAM has to be refreshed approximately every 15ms because it stores data as electrical charges which gradually discharges. Nevertheless, DRAM is popular because of its high (MB per chip) density and low price.

  • FPM (Fast Page Mode) speeds DRAM standard access of 50 and 70ns because rather than sending both row and column address to a memory cell, FPM sends row addresses just once for many accesses to memory near each other.
  • EDO (Extended Data Output) DRAM improves read times up to 30% by outputing data from one address while simultaneously setting up the access request for the next one.
  • BEDO (Burst Extended Data Output) DRAM is supported by some motherboards, but has not gained wide acceptance. It is similar in performance to Synchronous DRAM.
  • SDRAM (Synchronous DRAM) is designed to run at motherboard clock speeds: 66, 100, and 133MHz. for transfer speeds of up to 1.064 GB/sec.
  • Rambus DRAM (RDRAM), proprietary to Intel and Rambus, uses a bus width of 2 bytes vs. SDRAM's 8 bytes, to achieve effective clock speeds of up to 800MHz and speeds of up to 1.6 GB/sec.
  • Double Data Rate SDRAM (DDR SDRAM) transfers data twice in one cycle for speeds from 100Mhz to 166Mhz and theoretical maximum bandwidth for 100Mhz DDR at 1.6 GB/sec (100Mhz x 2 x 8 bytes). So for marketing hype they are named PC1600, PC2100, etc.
  • Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) store data in an electronic circuit called a flip-flop. which is four or five times faster than DRAM because it uses six transitors to store a bit cell vs. one for DRAM.
  • VRAM (or dual-port RAM) is used on high-performance video adapters by giving separate read and write ports for simultaneous read/write.
  • WRAM (Window RAM) is a modification of dual-port VRAM for 25% faster speed for graphics cards such as Matrox's Millennium series.
  • SGRAM (Synchronous Graphics RAM) increases its single-port DRAM memory transfer speed by working with video card acceleration features.

• Celeron chips ("The Castrated One") don't have 512K L2 2nd-level Cache memory
• Chips can be 5V or 3.5V (used in laptops), internal bus provides 5 and 12V power.
• Within a system bus, the North Bridge connects to low (2.5v) voltage devices such as DRAMs and 1.5V AGP buses (such as Intel 815 and 845G integrated chipset used on nVIDIA nForce2). The South Bridge connects to higher (3.5 - 5V) voltage devices such as I/O.
• Two power connectors: larger milky molex connectors and small white berg connectors in 12V or 5v. Check with a voltmeter. 12v chip fans have to connect directly from the power supply

• Windows 9x recognizes up to 3 parallel ports.
• Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) refers to two or more processors operating with equal priorities in a system.
• Intel's P6 Microarchitecture processors are housed in a Single Edge Contact Cartridge (S.E.C.C.) attached to a 242 Contact Slot Connector on the motherboard. Its Dual Independent Bus (DIB) architecture provides a separate, dedicated bus for the L2 cache using BSRAM (Burst Sync Random Access Memory) chips. This second bus removes a large amount of traffic from the system bus, providing improved throughput. The L2 cache bus runs at half the processor's internal speed, flexibiy increasing speed processor speed increases.

  P6 systems BIOS can take advantage of multiple processors working together and share workloads. Mulit-processing must be enabled by a BIOS setting called MPS (MultiProcessing Specification), Different versions of MPS: MPS1.4 is the proper setting for all multiple processor systems running any version of Windows NT. The BIOS setting must be reset each time the BIOS is upgraded. MPS1.1, the default version, is for all multiprocessing systems except Windows NT*, such as Netware* (4.x and up), Unixware* (2.11SMP and up) and SCO OpenServer*.

BIOS Manufacturers

Unicore ( AMI & Award) 978-686-6468
Mr. BIOS (MB)
Phoenix 781-551-4000
Micro Firmware (Phoenix) 405-321-8333

Chip Directory has numerically and functionally ordered chip lists, chip pinouts and lists of chip manufacturers, controller embedding tools manufacturers, electronics books, cdrom's, magazines, and web links.

Motherboard Manufacturers

Evaluations by the Duke of URL

11th commandment: Covet not thy neighbor's Pentium.

Links:

Peripheral IRQ Settings:		Address
0	Timer
1	Keyboard	16h
2	Secondary Processor Interrupt controller (to IRQ 9)
3	Modem at COM2, COM4	14 h	2F8h, 2E8h
4	Serial mouse at COM1, COM3		3F8h, 3E8h
5	* LPT2 or MIDI sound		378h
6	Floppy Disk Drive		3F2h
7	Printer at LPT1, LPT3	17h	3BCh, 278h
8	Real-time Clock	1Ah
9	Sound card DMA 1 or Redirected IRQ 2		220h - 22Fh
10	SCSI or Second NIC for Routing or
	Video capture		30Ch - 30Fh
11	* Primary NIC or Secondary SCSI
12	PS/2 Mouse Port
13	Floating-point Math Coprocessor
14	IDE Hard Drive
15	* Secondary Hard Disk, Zip drive, Scanner, etc.

To display properties of objIRQ objects in WBEMClass "Win32_IRQResource", run this from the Resource Kit: Cscript "IRQRes.vbs"

Name = IRQ9
IRQ Number = 9
Hardware = True

Monitors and Video Capture

Pins	Standard	Year Intro	Color Depth	Number of Colors at a time	Pixels in Graphics Mode	Refresh Rate	HSYNC KHz
9	Color Graphics Adapter	'82	RGB	16	640 x 200	60Hz	15
	Enhanced Graphics Adapter	'82	RGB	64	640 x 350	60Hz	22.1
15	Video Graphics Array	'89	4 bit	16	640 x 480	60,70	31.5
	Super VGA	'90	8 bit	256	1024 x 768 1280 x 1024	50,60,72	35-48
	XGA	'92	8 bit	256	1024 x 768	44,70	35.5
	-	-	16 bit	65,536	High Color 1760 x 1169
	-	-	24 bit	16,777,216	True Color
	-	-	32 bit	4,294,967,296	-

Compare resolutions of photos and TVs

• VGA signal cables plug into 15 pin male D-shell connectors on the video adapter.
• A .28 dot pitch means .28 mm between dots on the screen.
• In monochrome text mode, 5x7 or 7x9 dot-matrix characters are generated.
• Each pixel picture element (PELs) has a trio of Red Green Blue dots.

• VGA delivers a single non-interlaced screen presented 30 frames per second (60 Hz field rate).
• Studio-quality American NTSC (National Television Standards Committee) TV delivers 512x512 480x720 pixel (525.5 vertical line) resolution in two interlaced frames presented at a rate of 29.97 frames per second (59.94 Hz field rate).
• PAL (Phase Alternate Lines), adopted by UK, Brazil, Japan, and China delivers 576x720 pixel 625 vertical lines at 25 fps (50 Hz field rate).
• SECAM (SEquential Couleur Avec Memoire) was invented by the French but adopted by most Eastern bloc countries.

• Signals on TV antenna wire is 300 Ohm, is converted to Cable TV 75 Ohm.
• Video cards convert the color space from analog RF signals containing YUV (Luminescence and color) to digital RGB signals for VGA use. The native color representation of video cameras, television, and computer monitors is gamma corrected R'G'B' (4:4:4 in studio video terminology).
• To take advantage of the human eye's poor color acuity, luma and chroma can be discarded in subsampled in Y'C_BC_R 4:2:2 format, which saves disk space.

• To support DVD, display adapter and monitor should support 800 × 600 × 16 bits per pixel (BPP) graphics or better. DVD-Video is played from files in the Video_TS folder on only a single local drive.
• DVD playback in HiVision HDTV widescreen 16:9 (rather than the traditional 4:3) aspect ratio.
• Analog S-video is clearer than Composite (raster scan) video.

• Windows 98 and Windows 2000 includes multiple monitor support, allowing a single desktop to span 2 to 10 monitors on PCI or AGP video cards.
• Graphics accelerators on a AGP are faster than on a PCI bus because Rather than using limited local video memory, AGP it dynamically allocates and then executes texture maps directly from system memory
• To support cool 3D screen savers such as "Liquid Desktop" from Isotope244, Download GLSetup which detects your 3D graphics card chipset and installs the most recent matching OpenGL drivers. This assumes you also have the latest drivers for your motherboard, DirectX 7 or higher, and Win9x (not WinNT).

Monitor Manufacturers:

Video Card Manufacturers:

Info on Video Technologies:

Floppy Disks:

• Use 34 pin BERG connectors on FDD signal cables.
• Drive A gets the end of the cable.
• Drive B gets the middle connector.
• The Drive Select (DS) jumper on the drive's printed-circuit board
• 601 error code.
• If the light is lit continuously, the cable is mounted backward.

• 1.44MB diskettes can contain up to 214 files in the root directory. During formatting using FAT (FAT16), 16 sectors are typically set aside for the 32 bytes needed to hold attributes for each file.

CD Drives:

• CD-ROMS use ATAPI drivers. The speed of CD-ROM spindles are varied so that the track passing the laser is between 3.95 and 4.6 feet per second. This allows a CD to store 680MB. Each "X" speed transfers data at 150KB per second. A 32X drive transfers data at 4,800KB per second.
• When using drives larger than 8GB on Windows NT4, get the updated ATAPI driver on a diskette and install it.
• Windows 3.1 used the MSCDEX external CD-ROM driver for real-mode operation.
• Windows 95 comes with the CDFS (CD-ROM File System) CD-ROM protected-mode driver, and will, at initial boot-up, automatically REM out MSCDEX lines in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file.
• Under Solaris, Rock-Ridge extensions to the HSFS (High Sierra File System) standard CD-ROM file system support the full range of Unix file information with directory names that contain characters supported under UFS.

• To display properties of objInst objects in WBEMClass "Win32_CDRomDrive", information about your CDROM drives, run this from the Resource Kit:
  Cscript "cdromdrives.vbs"

  Manufacturer:               (Standard CD-ROM drives)
  Description:                CD-ROM Drive
  Drive:                      G:
  Status:                     OK
  Media Loaded:               No
  Volume Name:
  Volume Serial Number:
  Maximum Component Length:
  Device ID:                  IDE\CDROMPIONEER_CD-ROM_DR ... 
  PNP Device ID:
  SCSI Target Id:             0
  Drive Integrity:            
  Config Manager Error Code:  0
  Config Manager User Config: False
  Creation Class Name:        Win32_CDROMDrive
  

Hard Disk Configuration:

Adaptec Apple Mac hard drives CMS Enhancements Fujitsu Hitachi IBM Iomega (Zip Drives) JTS Maxtor Memorex CD-RW 562-906-2800 Micropolis RAID NEC Quantum Samsung Seagate SyQuest Tekram Toshiba Western Digital On-Track Data Recovery Hard Drive Configuration

• Max. 4 IDE: (Integrated Device Electronics) drives [ not Java Intergrated Development Environments!
  • Max. two masters and two slave hard drives.
  • Max. three primary partitions, one extended partition.
  • EIDE/Fast ATA/2 ATAttachment allows for more than 2 drives and the AT ATAPI.

    Determine the correct hard drive jumper settings with this Java applet from Ontrack. Usually:

    • Master drive: jumper ON?,
    • Slave drive: jumper OFF?
    • Plug master on middle ribbon connector nearest to the CPU on motherboard.
    • Plug slave on end ribbon connector.

  DMA Slot	Device Jumper	Cable Connector	Linux	Partition	Drive Letter	Usage
  #1	Master	middle	hdaX	Primary	C:	System/Boot
  	Slave	end	hdcX	Primary	E:	CD/DVD 1
  #2	Master	middle	hdbX	Primary	D:	Data drive
  	Slave	end	hddX	Extended	F:	CD/DVD 2

  
  Windows assigns by default second physical drive D:
  Colored edge of ribbon cable neareast power source plug!

• SCSI devices (Linux sda, sdb, etc.):
  • Radified Guide to SCSI
  • STA SCSI Trade Association
  • Gary Field's SCSI FAQ
  • SCSI Guide
  • terminating transistors on the last device (both ends)
  • WARNING: Make sure that you uniquely assign Logical Unit (LU) numbers to each device. Conflicts in assignments can fry devices to death. Boot HDD need to be set to SCSI ID 0. CD burners and CDROMs typically get SCSI IDs #3 & 4.
• Data transfer rate is stored in CMOS. After SCSI installation, no changes to CMOS is necessary.

• platters ???
• 3.5" drives have between 315 and 1,024 cylinders (sets of tracks) divided into 17 - 50 sectors.
• FAT hard drives typically can contain up to 512 files in the root directory because only 16 sectors are set aside for it.
• A cluster takes 1 to 16 sectors.

  Master Boot Record (MBR)

  FAT keeps track of what clusters are used and which are free in the MBR (Master Boot Record).

  The MBR (Master Boot Record) is at sector-o, head-o, and track-o of the first logical hard drive that is bootable. A bootstrap loader routine can also be located in the ROM extension of a network card (perhaps by a virus).

  To reset the MBR:

  FDISK /MBR

• Hard drive heads spin at 5,400, 7,200, 10,000 RPM 50 microns above the magnetic substrate. That's 100 times larger than the diameter of a human hair. (So don't rock the PC.)

  An analogy of this is if the read/write heads were a Boeing 767 flying over a hard disk platter as the surface of the Earth:
  The head would fly at Mach 800 at less than one centimeter from the ground, counting every blade of grass, making fewer than 10 unrecoverable counting errors in an area equivalent to all of Ireland.

Hard Drive Speeds and Cables

Max. Data Transfer rate MB/s	Drive Name Type	Data Width	Cable Length & type	Max. # devices	Note
10	IDE	8 bits	40-pin 40 wire 18 in. cables	2
33	IDE Ultra DMA
66	IDE Ultra DMA				drives jumpered to “Cable Select”.
5	SCSI-1	8 bits	6 m (SE) or 12 m (LVD)	7
10	Fast (Narrow) SCSI-2		3 meters (10 feet) long 50 pin cables	7 (identifiers 0 - 6 set with jumpers, with 7 for the controller)	10 Mhz
20	Fast Wide SCSI-2	16 bit		15	with passive terminators, 20 Mhz
20	Ultra (Narrow) SCSI-3	8 bit	1.5 meters	7	with passive terminators, 20 Mhz
40	Ultra Ultra (Wide Ultra) SCSI-3	16 bit		7 (SE) or 15 (LVD)	with active terminators
40	Ultra2 Narrow SCSI-4	8 bit	12 meters LVD (Low Voltage Differential) signaling 68-pin MicroD -- Requires bus drivers	7	40 Mhz.
80	Wide Ultra2 SCSI-4	16 bit		15
80	Narrow Ultra3	8 bit		15	?
160	Ultra3 compliant Ultra160 SCSI	16 bit		15	adds double transition clocking, domain name validation checked at the negotiated rate to ensure drive availability, and cyclic redundancy check.
320	Ultra3 wide (Ultra320)	16 bit		16	?
100	Fibre Channel	16 bit	10K meters	126	Single loop fiber optic cable

Data Width: “Wide” SCSI is 16-bit, Narrow is 8-bit.

Each device on a SCSI bus is identified by a SCSI ID, which ranges from 0 to 7 or sometimes 0 to 15. The SCSI adapter itself occupies a SCSI ID, which leaves 6 or 14 available for actual devices.

Hard Disk Setup:

• The maximum size of a file is 2GB on a FAT16 drive; 4GB on a FAT32 drive.
• The maximum size of a FAT32 volume is limited to 32 GB in Windows 9x, 64 GB in Windows 2000. 32 byte file entries in FAT32 allows partitions to be up to 8GB by using 4KB cluster sizes.

• Windows 95 and Windows NT4 do not support FAT32 introduced with Windows 95 OSR2.

  Windows 2000 supports several file systems:

  • FAT12 for small volumes such as floppy disks.
  • CD-ROM File System (CDFS), an implementation of ISO 9660, for CD-ROM read/write access
  • Universal Disk Format (UDF) 1.5 for read-only access to Digital Versatile Disks (DVD).

  Linux ID	Partition Type
  5	Extended
  6	DOS 16 bit (larger than 32 MB)
  b	Windows 95 FAT 32
  82	Linux Swap
  83	Linux Native

• Older BIOS do not support Enhanced mode which uses Logical Block Addressing (LBA) techniques to create larger partitions. This Enhanced Cylinder, Heads, Sectors (ECHS) technique increases from 16 to 256 the maximum number of R/W heads.

• If BIOS recognizes a drive but Win98 doesn't recognize it, the drive may have been formatted for NTFS (which only NT or Win2000 OS's can read).

• 4KB is the max. block size for Windows 2000 NTFS5 compressed drives.

• Setting hard disk performance (diskperf.exe) counters

File System	Partition /Volume Size	Alloc Unit	Note
FAT12	16 MB	4096
FAT16	128 MB	2048
	1 GB	16384
	Max. 2047 MB (2 GB)	32768	Max.
FAT32	< 260 MB	512	Windows 95 OSR2 only using FDISK Large Disk Support (LBA) option
	8192 MB	4096 default
	16 GB	8192
	Max. 32 GB	16384
	Max. 64 GB	32768	Creation by Windows 2000 Won't be recognized by Windows 9x
NTFS	10 MB to 2 Terabytes	4096 default	File & Folder security, encryption, disk quotas

Volume size	cluster size
	FAT	FAT32	NTFS
7 MB–16 MB	2 KB	Not supported	512 bytes
17 MB–32 MB	512 bytes	Not supported	512 bytes
33 MB–64 MB	1 KB	512 bytes	512 bytes
65 MB–128 MB	2 KB	1 KB	512 bytes
129 MB–256 MB	4 KB	2 KB	512 bytes
257 MB–512 MB	8 KB	4 KB	512 bytes
513 MB–1,024 MB	16 KB	4 KB	1 KB
1,025 MB–2 GB	32 KB	4 KB	2 KB
2 GB–4 GB	64 KB	4 KB	4 KB
4 GB–8 GB	Not supported	4 KB	4 KB
8 GB–16 GB	Not supported	8 KB	4 KB
16 GB–32 GB	Not supported	16 KB	4 KB
32 GB–2 TB	Not supported	Not supported	4 KB

Printers:

• PC printer cables use 36 pin Centronics D-shell connectors.
• Pitch in number of characters per inch. Each point is 1/72 of an inch. Pica is 10 point. Elite is 12 points.
• Paper thickness is measured in pounds per 17 x 22.5 inch sheets.
• Impact platten printers make carbon copies: drum, chain, 9, 18, 24 pin Dot matrix
• Thermal printers use special light-sensitive paper.
• Non-impact: Ink Jet (bubble jet) create characters fully formed from Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK inks.
  CNET's top 5 Injet printers
• Laser page printers use ion deposition technology:
  1. Cleaning: Erase lamps neutralize charge
  2. Conditioning: The rotating photosensitive drum receives an overall -600V charge.
  3. Registration: The laser creates high-voltage (+1000 Vdc) to make positive spots on the drum for dark areas.
  4. Writing: negative charged fine toner is attracted to the spots.
  5. Developing: The Corona wire applies a positive charge through the paper.
  6. Transferring: The negatively charged toner in an image jumps to the more positive paper.
  7. Fusing: Pressure from Teflon-coated compression bottom roller and top roller heated to 140C and 230C fuses toner on the paper

• To install a network printer on Windows 9x, click on Network Neighborhood, Computer name, Printer name, and alt-click Install. Windows 9x OEM drivers are installed from an OEMSETUP.INF file. Windows 9x temporary spool files (.SPL and .TMP) files in the SYSTEM/SPOOL/PRINTERS directory may not be automatically deleted.
• Page Description Languages:
  • Adobe Postscript Level 2 or Level 5
  • HPGL Hewlett-Packard Graphics Language
• The various sizes and resolutions of a Microsoft TrueType font is created from an FOT and TTF file character set displayed in the Control Panel's Character Map.
• Sun's Jini Technology for Java networking federations of devices.

Manufacturers

Mice, Keyboards, and Pointing Devices:

• 5 pin DIN male connectors ground using pin 4.
• 301 error codes
• External Modem cables plug into DB-9 & DB-25 male connectors.
• Serial mice plug into DB-9 male connectors or PS/2
• Windows only support mice at COM1 and COM2 (not COM3 and COM4)
• Joystick cable goes in DB-15 female connectors on sound cards.
• A full size piano has ___ ebony and ivory keys. The original PC had 84 keys. 101/102 key keyboards add the numeric keys at the right. 104 key, internet
• Some BIOS can set Num Lock on or off upon boot-up.

Manufacturers

AV & home theatre technologies by Alan Dolski

Linux newbies

Sound cards, speakers, thunder seats:

• The system audio output device is a 2.25-inch, 8-ohm, 1/2-watt speaker. Its output frequency range extends through the complete audio range.
• 8 bit sound cards can produce 256 tones.
• The MIDI interface protocol lists 16 (patch) channels and 128 General MIDI Standard program codes for different instrument sounds. Each MIDI note played can have a velocity (loudness) from 0 to 127. Round, 5-pin DIN connectors are used for In, Out, and Through serial communications.

• The Microsoft Media Control Interface spec for controlling multimedia devices ???
• What's Dolby and THX 5.1" sound???

Manufacturers