Computers brought about their own language and every year they contribute significantly to the 10,000 plus words that are officially added to the English language.

Understanding some of the terminology can greatly increase your chances of getting what you want when looking to upgrade or buy a computer.

Anything ending in byte or bite refers to size, ie a 400 Gigabyte (GB) hard drive refers to the amount of storage space on your computer, or a 4 megabyte (MB) file refers to the size of a particular document or picture etc. Files can also be kilobyte (kb) size.

There are 1024 kilobytes to 1 megabyte, 1024 megabytes to 1 gigabyte and 1024 gigabytes to 1 terabyte. There are more, but you won’t find those on a home computer – yet.

So, when trying to decide how many files you can send in an email or put on a disk, all it takes is a little math and some conversion to determine the answer. Email servers used to have a 3MB email size, but some places can accept larger emails, ie printing companies, etc have special arrangements to accept large files. If you need to send a really large file there are other options available, ie instant messaging programs like MSN often have file sharing features or ftp programs like FlashFXP.

Ram, also known as memory, is described using megabyte and gigabyte, again because it refers to size. Most computers today have a minimum of 256 megabytes of ram to as much as 4 gigabytes. Ram is not storage space, even though it’s called memory. It does not store files rather provides a means for the various programs to run efficiently. Think of it like a car, power is the gas and ram is oil and your hard drive is the gas tank. The more oil you put in the smoother the operation of the car, the more ram you have the smoother the operation of the computer. Of course, like a car can’t take unlimited amounts of oil (some engines want a max of 4 litres some 5 etc) some computers can only accept 1GB of ram, some more, some less.

Anything ending in hertz refers to speed. When computers first hit the market, 64 megahertz was fast! Now, computers are approaching 4 gigahertz. The same holds true for hertz as byte, 1024 megahertz (MHz) is one gigahertz (GHz) etc.

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Tags: gigabyte, megahertz, microsoft, office, windows

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 1:37 am and is filed under help. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.