 Hi there, my name is Ken Mayer. I'll be your instructor for this course. I have been working in this industry for the last 30 some odd years. Of course, that means I've had the chance to watch personal computers. Not only first get introduced into the market, but also become as popular as they are today. Working with a variety of different operating systems that we started off, of course, with just command lines, with what we call DOS back in those days, to some of the first introductions to Windows, like Windows 3.1 that got very popular very quickly. Working as well with competing vendors through the Macintosh environment and some of the others that were kind of on the upstart, but didn't quite survive. But anyway, we fast forward to that, where I was working also in the business of building some computers. I love building my own home servers. So I'm gonna hopefully be able to show you through all of my experience, how to be able to get comfortable with the personal computer and with Windows 8 and be able to make it something that's manageable and very useful for you in a practical application. In this lesson, we're gonna talk about what the actual personal computer is and also introduce you to the Windows 8 user interface. And our goal, of course, is to try to help you put those together that the operating system was designed to help you interact with the actual hardware. So we'll identify the most common components of a personal computer. We'll talk about how to sign into Windows 8 and then the navigation of the first start screen that you see when we're there. All right, in this topic, we're going to cover the desktop PC. But I will also wanna talk a little bit about some of the other types of devices that you may come across that are also gonna use Windows 8. All right, we'll start off first, I guess, talking about the system unit. It's gone through a lot of different names over time. You may still hear people talk about having a tower. And when you see the tower, basically you're looking at something that's standing upright versus a desktop option of the system unit, which just meant that it was this tower tipped on its side. And of course, in some of the PCs you might buy, you might not even see the system unit because it'll be integrated in with the monitor. But let's talk about what the system unit is. The system unit is the computer itself. That's where you're gonna house the CPU, the central processing unit that does all of our work, where we're gonna have the memory that is crucial for the applications and for just basic functionality of the operating system. And we'll also probably have some sort of storage in there that you often would call the hard drive. And there's a number of other components that you would see inside of this system unit. Some of you may see a network interface card. You may have one that was designed for wireless network that we call Wi-Fi. And there's again many other components that you would see inside, but I don't wanna go through and list every single one. It would take a long time. But one of the things that's important to understand is that it is when you're looking at the purchase of one, you gotta ask some of the questions, especially about memory and storage, hard drive, as well as CPUs. They all come in different, obviously performance capabilities or how much of any one of these components you can buy or purchase. But let me just say that the CPU is one of your crucial elements to be able to have a very fast running personal computer. We talk into today with the dual and the quad cores. And that's different than 10 years ago when we only had one CPU inside of our system unit and now we can have basically one chip that's acting like two or four CPUs. And so obviously the more you have of the cores, the more processing you're gonna have. With that, if you run a lot of applications, they almost all need memory. Memory is designed to be a short term storage location. In other words, if memory doesn't have any power to keep running, the information that's in memory will be gone. It's that short term. It's designed to be volatile and also to be fast to be able to work with the CPU and being able to exchange information from one application to another. Your permanent storage is on the hard drive. That's where we magnetically will store information. It doesn't require to have power, except for when it's running, but if you turn the power off, whatever you've stored will still be there. Those are crucial components, like I said, to have a well-running PC. In the world of the network interface card and or the wireless connections, most often the Wi-Fi is mostly about the type of Wi-Fi as far as the throughput and the connectivity and the distance you can go. And in today's world, we're looking at 802.11n as the most common use of Wi-Fi because it gives you the most distance and the best capability of having fast communications with the internet. But remember, most of you who have home network connections through cable or DSL probably won't need this much throughput because it will be more than what you have as a home user, but that's okay in case of future growth. Again, like I said, we call that the network interface card. There's also a wired option that you might see if you're at work working with a PC. But again, that's the system unit. That's the core of the personal computers. Most everything else we can look at, like a display device, is considered a peripheral. And of course, what good is having this PC if you don't have a display device, but that is the idea of what we're wanting is to have a way of being able to interact with applications that are running on the actual system unit. And those applications also help us be able to communicate with the other peripherals such as speakers, if you want to be able to have output of sound for watching online videos, streaming media, those types of things. If you want the hard copy of any data that you're working with, of course there we would have the printer. And we also have to have input devices. Now the keyboard is the most common input device that you would be using. Again, they come in a variety of styles, some designed for ergonomics, so it doesn't put any stress on the neck or the shoulders. Some may or may not have the extra keypad for the numbers that you want to use. Another input device that we see is called the mouse. We often actually called the mouse a pointing device because the mouse's job was to basically allow you to put, I'm gonna redraw the monitor here so you can see my ink, to be able to create an XY combination of where your pointing device is on the screen so that when you click on it, it would register as a certain spot and then Windows would be able to look and see what was being drawn there, what kind of button that you were clicking on or a box that you can enter some information in and respond appropriately. And so of course that means the mouse would require the movement with your hand to move it back and forth to be able to get to that XY coordinates and to be able to do the clicks. So anything else that you add on here, as I said, would still be considered a type of peripheral. If some of you get into gaming mode and you want a joystick, you normally would probably have one that would connect through a USB cord or cable into the PC and depending on the system unit, the USB options may be in the back of the machine, some will also have USB in the front of the system unit and of course the nice thing about these peripherals is they can only fit into one spot so you can't accidentally plug a USB into something like a speaker jack or some other type of connection like the one you would use for the monitor. And in today's world, most any of these that you set up out of the box will give you a color coordinated map of showing you how to put them all together.