CompTIA A_ Certification All-In-One Exam Guide, Seventh Edition - Michael Meyers [473]
This chapter starts with an overview of how computers work and then dives into a section on dealing with customers and how to get them to tell you what you need to know and smile about it. The chapter wraps up with a proven troubleshooting methodology to help you figure out the source of problems and point you to the fix quickly.
Essentials
How Computers Work
You’ve spent a lot of time going through this book, reading about technologies and components in great detail. Each chapter contained troubleshooting information and methodologies for the components explained in that chapter. In Chapter 5, “Microprocessors,” for example, you learned all about CPUs, from how they work to how to install them. You also learned about issues specific to CPUs, including the potentially difficult task of adding or removing the fan and heat sink assembly that all CPUs require. In Chapters 11, “Hard Drive Technologies,” and 12, “Implementing Hard Drives,” you dove into hard drives in gory detail. With each chapter, you added more and more information about the pieces that make up the personal computer today.
In this chapter, I want you to distill that knowledge, to think about the computer as a coherent machine. Each of the computer’s components works together to enable people to produce some amazing things.
To master the art of troubleshooting as a PC tech, you need to approach a technical problem and answer one question: “What can it be? What can be causing this problem?” (Okay, that was two questions, but you get the idea.) Because every process involves multiple components, you must understand the interconnectedness of those components. If Jane can’t print, for example, what could it be? Connectivity? Drivers? Paper jam? Slow network connection? Frozen application? Solar flares? Let’s look at the process.
Way back in Chapter 3, “The Visible PC,” you learned about the four parts of the computing process; input, processing, output, and storage. Let’s take a moment to review the computing process; this time to see how you can use it to help you fix computers.
When you run a program, your computer goes through three of the four stages of the computing process: input, processing, and output (Figure 27-1). Input requires specific devices, such as the keyboard and mouse, that enable you to tell the computer to do something, such as open a program or type a word. The operating system (OS) provides an interface and tools so that the microprocessor and other chips can process your request. The image on the monitor or sound from the speakers effectively tells you that the computer has interpreted your command and spit out the result. The fourth stage, storage, comes into play when you want to save a document and when you first open programs and other files.
Figure 27-1 Input, processing, and output
Making this process work, though, requires the complex interaction of many components, including multiple pieces of hardware and layers of software. As a tech, you need to understand all the components and how they work together so that when something doesn’t work right, you can track down the source and fix it. A look at a modern program reveals that even a seemingly simple action or change on the screen requires many things to happen within the computer.
Games such as Second Life (Figure 27-2) are huge, taking up multiple gigabytes of space on an Internet server. They simply won’t fit into the RAM in most computers, so developers have figured out ways to minimize RAM usage.
Figure 27-2 Second Life
In Second Life, for example, you move through the online world in a series of more or less seamlessly connected areas. Crossing a bridge from one island to another triggers the game