| A | B |
|---|
| IDE | Integrated device electronics. a method of disk drive that allocates all the required controller circuitry in the drive.(2 hard drives per controller) |
| Enhanced IDE (EIDE) | allows for two IDE channels that can each support two devices |
| AT Attatchment (ATA) | also known as IDE, also known as ISA bus, a 16-bit data bus |
| ATA-33 | extension to the ATA that will double top data transfer speed up to 33mbps.(ultra IDE) |
| SCSI | small computer standard interface. standard data pathway used mostly for hard drives and cd-roms, also common for scanners and printers |
| millisecond | one thousandth of a second used to measure access speed of hard drives |
| system hang | when a program fails, it has the opportunity to display an error or diagnostic message. if the entire system fails, messages dont appear and input is blocked. in bad cases the system cannot restart unless the whole system turned off |
| POST | power-on self test.a group of ROM BIOS diagnostic tests that are performed on the system each time it is powered on. |
| cold boot | to turn on a computer, or to restart a computer by turning it off, waiting a few seconds and turning it on again |
| Warm Boot | to restart by pressing ctrl+alt=del |
| Boot Disk | a write-protected floppy disk that contains the computers system and start up files |
| Boot sector | A portion of a disk that contains the coded instructions for the operating system to start the computer |
| safe mode | win95 mode automatically loaded when windows crashes during boot up. pressing F8 during windows load up screen will access safe mode |
| Scanner | a device used to copy an image from a physical source(such as a picture) into a computer |
| LPT1 | the label used in MS-DOS assigned to parallel port 1 |
| COM1 | the label used in MS-DOS assigned to serial port 1 |
| MTBF | mean time between failures. this is a time, normally given in hours, that predicts the failure of a device |
| Asynchronous | this method of communicationtransfers data without a specific timing mechanism between the two communicating parties |
| VGA | video graphics array.developed by IBM,has become the de facto standard for computers |
