Look inside your PC

Dear People,

Here I wish to share PC Hardware & Common problems and their troubleshooting with you to do yourself without difficulty. That is why it is needed to know what's there really "Inside your PC".
Look into this picture as it clearly showing you most common components in your Personal Computer.
Let us now try to figure out the components and their use in very simple way.
1. Power Supply
2. Cabinet(Upper Case made with metal/pvc)
3. Space provided for CD-ROM/RW, DVD etc.,
4. Front Panel
5. CDROM Drive
6. CPU-Heat Sink with Fan(under this, the main Micro-Processor(CPU) exists.
7. RAM Modules (DIMM/SIMM)
8. Floppy Disk Drive(FDD)
9. Hard Disk Drive(HDD)
10. Space provided to fix Hard Drives.
11. Mother Board
12. Space provided for external PCI Cards (Ex. Modem, VGA(Display Card), Sound Card, SCSI Bus Cards, Fire ware Card and Ethernet/LAN cards and Video Capture/TV-Tuner Cards etc.,).

All those are the basic parts in your PC. You may have Graphic Cards as well, but you can identify the slots by their color. All while colored slots are to be called as PCI slots. All Black colored(not in use now a days) slots are either ISA/EISA slots. Normally these slots are placed on bottom(edge) side colored in black. The Gray Colored Slot after these PCI are called as Graphic Port. If you find any small sized gray colored slot on mother board, recognize this as AMR Modem Slot.

Now a days, all motherboards are designed it’s features onboard(Onboard features are: USB[Normally provides 2/4 sockets each having 4 wire only], LAN/Ethernet[Normally it comes with RJ-45 Connectors having 8 pin conductors looking like telephone sockets], Modem, Sound Card[it has three small sockets colored in Pink, Green and Blue – Pink colored one for Microphone input, Green colored one for Speaker Out and Blue colored one is for Line-In], Game Port[D-Type 15 pin female connector colored in yellow], Printer Port/LPT[D-Type 25 pin female connector colored in Magenta], Serial Port/COM Port[D-Type 9 pin male connector]). So you need not worry to add additional cards to your system until unless you required them.

Now we see brief about some important parts:

POWER SUPPLY: It is called as SMPS(Switched Mode Power Supply) and it's responsibility is to give suitable power supplies to all other sections in the system. Without any difficulty, you can easily Identify the power connectors where you have to insert them. If you find the biggest boxed type power connector with 20/24 Pin, understand that it is for Motherboard Supply(all latest systems using ATX form factors using this socket). Don't think that you may insert this socket in reverse, because of it's design(try to find it's lock provided one side). In case of AT power systems, this is very important to place the power sockets to it's pins in proper way, because there is either possibility to insert them in reverse order. Those connectors are called as P9/P8 Power connectors having 6 pins in each connector. While insert them into mother board, ensure that "Black-Colored" wires should be in middle.

Note: AT power supply delivers +5 V, +12 V, -5 V and -12 V voltages using two six-pin connectors. Note, that you must install these connectors to the motherboard in a way that the black wires are placed on the center, or your equipment will be damaged.

ATX specification includes not only Power Supply Unit, but also case and motherboard. In addition to old AT standard, one extra voltage line is available(+3.3V), connector changed to a single 20-pin and power supply uses a power-on wire, allowing PSU to be turned off by software.