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Chapter 7 System Storage

 

In this chapter the book covers all forms of system storage (even some that aren't truly “system storage”). For this summery of the chapter even though the book lightly covers RAM I will not be mentioning it any further as it is covered more thourally in another chapter. The most relevant (by mainstream use) of the the storage devices covered in this chapter are Hard disks, floppy disks, CD/DVD,s, Flash drives, and Microfilm.

We will start here with hard drives, It is pretty safe to say that all PCs have a hard drive be it a SATA, EIDE, SCSI, or SAS. These are the controller interfaces of standard hard drives the most common for PCs being ATA and SATA. Here in the characteristics of a hard drive is where we should branch off and add to the book, as the book tells you that hard drives have platters that are magnetically charged disks which are formatted most commonly in one of two form factors NTSF or FAT 32 (I don't remember if the book tells you that or not) FAT 32 being the more recognized but NTSF being slightly more efficient. These cylindrical pallets revolve around a Read/Write head that do exactly what there name implies either extract or add information to the disk. It is now time to step away from the book and cover the other type of hard drive Solid State drives. These drives are far superior to the classic platter drives as they have no moving parts, instead they have an array if flash cards that the information is stored on and have read/write speed far superior to that of a classic hard drive. They are commonly found with SATA controllers and are still a bit pricey for there storage capacities but that will quickly change as they are now commonly found in almost all lap-top computers.

Next we move on to Floppy disks, CD/DVDs, and Microfilm, These will be bunched together as they are more uniformly familiar to most people. Floppy disks are a out-dated and fairly unreliable way to store information they are made of a thin Mylar coted with a magnetic substance, and work much like a hard drive with minimal storage capacity (If you even touch one of the disks it will no longer work.). To replace the floppy came the CD and the DVD the technologies behind these two mediums are similar. They both use a plastic disk with a metallic coating then burn information into them. Although the physical working of these two devices is the same the formatting of the disk and the storage capabilities are very different. Then there is Microfilm mostly used for archiving it lasts forever but is not a digital medium and it ectntualy is just a roll of film that you put into a reader and it will low the image up on a screen. Typically these are found in library and museums.

Lastly we have flash drives, SD cards, thumb drives, whatever you want to call them the technology behind them is all the same. These are all solid state devices where the information is stored digitally, they have increasingly fast read/write speed and are fordable storage mediums with storage capabilities upwards of 132GB and this will only go up as technologies advances.     

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Chapter 8 Operating Systems and Utility Programs

This chapter covers the basic operating systems and mandatory utilities you will need to effectively keep you computer running at a good pace. It starts with talk of the system BIOS (basic input/output system) then dabbles a bit in the operating systems (OS), network OS's and then on to discuss utility programs. I'm choosing to leave out embedded OS's as to keep myself from going ona tangent as the book does not really say much about them.

The BIOS is the first thing to load when your computer is booted up, it acts as an interface between your hardware and your OS. To change the BIOS settings on most computers you just hit the F2 or F12 key before the OS's load screen appears (While the command line is still on the screen.), It is here that you can change the boot sequence along with many other hardware related functions. Making sure that you have the latest version of you motherboards BIOS is vital to the preference of you computer as well as it upgradability. (don't think thats a real word but you get the point.)

There are five main types of OS's for PC's the MAC OS X, Microsoft's Windows line, UNIX, LINUX, and BSD (not covered in the book ) all of these OS's offer both a GUI (graphical user interface) and a CLI (command line interface). OS X and the Windows lines of OS's are very similar in there use through the GUI's provided although the commands them selves are different the outcome is much the same, for most users these two OS's are interchangeable as they come with similar utilities (Yet the book does lie to you when it says that OS X will only run on a MAC as I currently am triple booting Ubuntu, OS X Leopard, and XP pro on my thirdary client.). If OS X , and the Windows line made the heads side of the coin UNIX, LINUX, and BSD would be on the tails side as this is the age old fight between open and closed source. As these three OS's are as much the same as they are different they will all except most if not all of the standard UNIX commands. The big difference between UNIX and Linux is the fact that UNIX will NOT run on an x86 based computer this is one of the main reasons Linux was developed in the first place. In UNIX the the kernel interacts directly with the hardware and will not run on a microprocessor. Linux and BSD are both UNIX based OS's that are similar to each other with a few differences in there kernels. The form of BSD used on PC is commonly FreeBSD as apposed to OpenBSD which is used on servers and mainframes. Linux distros are the fastest growing OS's out to date they offer great security where OS x and Windows lack, almost all the same features as there competitors and the biggest selling point it's free, making the only question what distro or distros to use.(Just a note if you buy a computer from Dell don't get Ubuntu on it because it is free just select no OS and save your self some money they charge somewhere in the $200 range last time I looked.).I could go on for about 100 more pages about all of this but the real point in all of this is yes there are small differences between all of the OS's Windows is the most used so it is the most exploited, for checking e-mail and surfing the web it doesn't really matter which one you have because you will never know the difference.

All OS's come with system utilities some a bit more user friendly than others and some just work better than others but they all esentualy do the same thing help you keep you computer tidy. System utilities such as file managers to help you store documents, pictures, music, etc in an organized way. Search utilities so you can find you files in case your absent minded or just a virtual slob. Firewalls to keep you safe, an unistaller for removing programs. These next few are the big ones that people often don't know are there that WILL help your systems performance, Disk scanner, defragmenter these two will find unused files and reline “broken” files (I don't mean literaly broken but that the file segments are not sitting next to each other.). Most OS's come with a diagnostic utility, from my experience these are pure crap, there are many third parties out there that make these that will work better that what you you OS provided you. (I would throw out some names but im sure I don't normally run the same OS you do.) The last one the book covers is the screen saver in there day they worked but you don't reely burn images into screens these days as LCD monitors are the new standard.( I think they might need a new name.)