The three most common things about monitors that are looked at when you are considering which to buy are dot pitch, resolution, and the refresh rate. Dot Pitch The dot pitch is a measurement of how close together the pixels, or phosphor dots, are that make up an image. For the most part, the finer the dot pitch, the better image quality you will have. But, the...

On this page, I will discuss the modem standards, from the old 300bps to ISDN. First lets discuss a few terms common to all modems. Standards to All Modems There are many standards for modem protocols, but the field has evened out lately. A protocol is a method by which two devices, modems, agree to communicate. You can think of it as a language that is agreed...

There are indeed many computer programming languages in the world of computers. Let’s run through some of them here. Assembly Language Assembly language is one step beyond the cryptic machine language. Assembly was created quickly as programmers learned the...

So, you’ve bought your new CD-ROM or DVD-ROM. All you have to do now is install it. Its not hard at all. Read the drive’s manual to familiarize yourself with what you’re about to do. Any installation techniques particular to your drive will be in the manual. This page serves only as a general outline. Also, just a reminder to remember to rid...

Flash BIOS Older computers may have BIOS too old to handle plug and play, fancy video cards, or large hard drives. In this case, it is wise to upgrade your BIOS. Many machines require that you install a whole new motherboard in order to swap the BIOS for something newer. Many Pentium machines, though, have Flash ROM, or Flash EPROM. If such chips are used in the...

Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) is really a misnomer in the way we use it today. IDE really refers to any drive with the controller built-in. The interface most of us use, that we call IDE, is actually called ATA, or AT Attachment. Most drives today are IDE. These drives have the controller built on. They plug into a bus connector on the motherboard or an...

Intel i850 Chipset One thing Intel has always had going for it was that they built in support for all the upcoming technologies. The i820 was one of the first to support RDRAM, the i815e had the onboard video (which wasn’t a new thing, except in that it used Intel’s new-at-the-time i752 video chipset). Once again Intel has heralded their new...

i820 Camino was a difficult chipset for Intel to finally release. Camino was originally scheduled for release around May of 1999, but was delayed because of problems with its handling of RDRAM. Release was rescheduled to later that year, but was delayed yet again due to problems dealing with more than two slots for SDRAM. They finally did get Camino out,...

On the 26th of April, 1999, Intel released its update to the famed i740 chipset. The i740, which was designed as a high quality 3D alternative to the Voodoo chipsets, succeeded at its goal. It was generally a bit cheaper because it was produced by Intel. Also, because Intel processors were what it was likely to be used on, who better than to make a...

Installing a processor is a fairly easy procedure. It can be done in just a few minutes. The procedure itself depends on the processor being installed and what type of processor interface is being used on the motherboard. The most time consuming part of this procedure is mounting the CPU fan. Sockets & Slots Most motherboards today and in the past use...

Installing/Upgrading a motherboard is one of the more involved procedures in do-it-yourself PC repair. This is not to say that it is difficult, just saying that many things are involved and that it can take a little bit of time. the amount of time is dependent on many factors. One of the factors that can prolong this process is your software. Because the...

The AMD K-Series chips started it all for AMD. Previously, their 286, 386, and 486 chips were almost exact copies of the Intel designs. With the K5, they came up with their first independent design. Of course, being new to it, they had some difficulties and the K5 was late coming into market. It was limited to cheaper systems. The K6, on the other hand, was a...

With the release of the Athlon processor in 1999, AMD’s status in the high performance realm was placed in concrete. The Athlon line continues to this day, with the highest clock speeds all operating off of various designs and improvements off of the Athlon series. But, the whole line started with the original Athlon classic. The original Athlon came at...

Before installing a sound card, there are a few things you should do. First, read the manual that came with the card. You can learn about all the different jumpers and such, plus learn about any weird configurations you may need to use. It will tell you what tools you need, too, but you will probably only need a Phillips screwdriver. You will need to install...

Memory installation is a pretty easy upgrade to perform. Most of the work, if you could call it that, comes before you actually do the upgrade – in being sure you get the right kind of memory for your system. For the purposes of this tutorial, we will assume you have already done this. We will break the tutorial up for the different types of memory. SIMMs...