CS100 Study Guide - Final Guide: Booting, Auxiliary Memory, Device Driver
6 Jun 2018
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Hardware: the physical equipment and device of a computer
3 components of hardware: CPU, primary memory and secondary storage, and peripherals.
CPU= brain, engine of the car. Does arithmetic, comparison, logic, date, control flow.
Each CPU has their own language but most manufacturer make them the same (e.g. intel and AMD)
CPU: make and model, number of cores, speed, power consumption, cache.
Secondary storage: permanent storage with hard drives (magnetism store info), flash drives (static
electricity stores info)
Flash drives: USB, SD cards, Solid State Drives (SSD).
Secondary storage stores operating system, programs, documents, settings.
Primary memory: also know as RAM (random access memory). It’s the work space of the computer.
CPUS takes program or files from secondary storage, copies it, and work it in primary memory.
Memory here is not permanently saved, need to save it back to secondary when done
working.
When opening a computer, boot loader copies the operating system from secondary
storage and start up program in primary memory and the computer will work.
A large cache is good, way faster than primary memory.
Peripherals: keyboard, mouse, WIFI, etc
Mouse event occurs the hardware that’s connected to the mouse tells the primary
memory what happened “the mouse moved a little” the hardware wakes up CPU
operating systems stops (interruption) and reads the code “the mouse moved a little” using
a device driver the operating system runs a software to move the mouse on the screen.
Mouse is event based peripheral, camera is polling based.
To put it all together, consider this sequence of events. Evan slaps Cooper to let him know that the
mouse button was clicked. Cooper then consults some of his pages and realizes that the mouse was
over the "take picture" button. Cooper taps Polly on the shoulder and tells her to take a picture and
then Cooper resumes his other work. Cooper sees the note that Polly is done, so he then takes the
picture and copies it into the special display region of the desk. Cooper then taps Dennis on the
shoulder and Dennis updates the display so the user can see the picture taken with the camera. To
help put things in perspective, it may help to remember that Cooper is hundreds or even thousands
of times faster than Evan, Polly and Dennis: to them, Cooper looks like the flash and is just a blur.
Hardware convergence: different hardware components (CPU, primary memory, WIFI, USB, Camera,
etc) combined into one single chip known as the system on chip (SoC)
Software: the programs that run on the hardware
Two types: application -interact with users, system – work in background to operate
computer
Some system programs designed to work without any user intervention are known
as services. Another type is the device driver which we talked about.
A vast majority of Application program is made up of instructions
Document Summary
Hardware: the physical equipment and device of a computer. 3 components of hardware: cpu, primary memory and secondary storage, and peripherals. Each cpu has their own language but most manufacturer make them the same (e. g. intel and amd) Cpu: make and model, number of cores, speed, power consumption, cache. Secondary storage: permanent storage with hard drives (magnetism store info), flash drives (static electricity stores info) Flash drives: usb, sd cards, solid state drives (ssd). Secondary storage stores operating system, programs, documents, settings. Primary memory: also know as ram (random access memory). Cpus takes program or files from secondary storage, copies it, and work it in primary memory. Memory here is not permanently saved, need to save it back to secondary when done working. When opening a computer, boot loader copies the operating system from secondary storage and start up program in primary memory and the computer will work. A large cache is good, way faster than primary memory.
