 Hi, welcome to class. My name is Sandra Vitakis, and I'll be your instructor throughout this course. Now, in my career, I can honestly say that I have lived in the trenches with every PC tech there is. We've gone back about 25 years, right to the point where computers weren't even quite on people's desks yet, and part of my job was to not only put them on the desk for the first time, but teach them how to turn it on. Moving throughout the career, I remember when A-plus came out. It was just a little shy of 20 years ago. A-plus back then was a little thin, boring book that was 100% lecture. 100% lecture, no demos, no nothing. I would lecture for two days straight, put them all to sleep, and send them on their way. Well, A-plus really has really grown as a course, and so is the technology to go with it. So we're going to take all of the technology-based discussions, mix it with a little bit of real life, and from that, use the experience to bring you through a very large, informative, and well-rounded course. Hello there, my name is Ken Mayer. I'll be your instructor for this course on the CompTIA A-plus certification. Now, my experience goes back to probably my first personal computer, which was in 1981. Back then, I actually had a variety of them. I had the TRS-80s, had the Amiga's, or the Commodore 64s, and have continued to love computers from that point forward. And when this actual certification first came out, which boy, that's even hard to remember, middle 90s, I think it was, I was one of those first ones sitting there in line, ready to get the certification, and have, of course, maintained my work in the realm of computers as either a hobbyist or as part of my job and the consulting that I've done. Now, over the years, which since the 80s, I have been doing a lot of contracting and consulting, from everything to service providers, routing and switching, to security work, to hacking information, to wireless networks, to voiceover IP, and I hope that since we're gonna talk a lot about some of the things that we need to build in the small office, home office, the SOHO, that I'll be able to use that experience and that knowledge to be able to help make this a better course for you to help make it more clear about all of the concepts that we're gonna cover. Now, part of our storage is basically what we called this ROM, read-only memory. Now, technically speaking, it's not read-only memory anymore. It's electrically erasable and programmable memory, but what it does, or what we said it was supposed to do, is contain the instruction codes in what we call the basic input output system that could help my PC through a power-on self-test. But remember, many of your adapter cards may also have its own ROM for the same purpose of being able to test the capabilities and communications of those adapter cards when they're used in the system card. Now, as I said, there may be updates from the vendors that either are going to try to fix a bug or maybe have new commands to be able to allow you to use new devices. You know, if somebody comes out with some new component that you wanna buy or use, and you're on a little bit of an older computer or a system board, you plug that new component in. Let's make it try to look like a little adapter card. You plug that thing in, and BIOS won't know what it is, because it says, hey, this wasn't around when my instructions were created, and that means I can't use it, I can't recognize it, and so that's where often you're gonna see these firmware updates. We often call it flashing the BIOS, but what we could do is we'd go out to either the firmware manufacturer if they have an update or to the vendor that made the system through the internet. We'd download this little file that would have whatever the new instructions are, and we would then flash that drive. Now, the reason we called it flash is because in the days before the electrically erasable, you could actually wipe out what was stored on these ROM chips through the use of an ultraviolet light being injected into a little slot in there to erase those contents. So it was like a little flash of light, so we called it flashing, but today it's not that way. It's a very easy process to be able to update. As I said, your BIOS is upgradable. We called it flashing your BIOS. Why would you wanna do a firmware upgrade? Because that's what you're gonna be doing. You'd be changing the instruction sets. Well, it could be just because of security patches. Yes, it is a possibility that there might be a flaw that could be taken advantage of through your BIOS or just whatever the case may be, security in just keeping the system up without having a bug. Performance updates as well, which are important because that might mean that there's new types of components that you can add into a computer. If your BIOS doesn't know how to recognize them, you might not be able to use them. So some updates for not just performance, but capabilities. And as I said, you could be fixing a bug. Now, as I said, the basic input output, the BIOS, is a part of the instruction sets that are on the read-only memory chip that is contained on your system boards, also contained on your adapter cards and many other components. And so those are found, and if you're not sure where they're at, that's where you need to basically look at the schematic of the system board from the manufacturer of that system board because not everything you see might actually be read-only memory. Here you see maybe a depiction of where one might be located on one system board, but that doesn't mean that it's in the same location on all system boards. The good news is, is that it's usually printed on the chip so you can read it when you're looking at the system board to find out what that component is. The power on self-test is a very important aspect of what we do in starting up the PC. Now, what it's gonna do is basically check the hardware components, the processor, it's gonna look at memory, the communications to the memories, the different types of communications buses that are in there, the different IO input output controllers, the communications and how well all of the hardware is working. It's gonna gather that list and often present that to the operating system as the operating system is booting up. So it knows what kind of components it has to talk to, be able to look to see if there are new components. In fact, that's the heart of what we often call plug-and-play where we made it sound like Windows actually found this new component and automatically got it installed and ready to go. But in reality, when you start up Windows, it would say, oh, okay, I see that the BIOS collected a new component that I didn't see before. And so it goes through its list to see, hey, do I have a driver for that? Do I know how to work with that device? Or should I input and ask somebody for that? And in a lot of today's cards, that information is even included in the ROM chips that are a part of that actual adapter card. But anyway, that's the importance of the post is that we need to make sure everything is working, including the location of an input device, a mouse, or a keyboard. And to be able to say, all right, now that I know all the components are up, all the communications are good, now we're ready to boot the operating system. Yeah.