Computer Tutorial
Learning faster saving time

Computers are increasingly important in our daily lives.  This computer tutorial is part of our learning time management skills series.  This series is looking at ways to reduce the amount of time spent on common computer tasks.

This computer tutorial is a foundation level tutorial.  It assumes you have very little knowledge about computers.

Foundations

Computers come in all shapes and sizes but generally they all consist of the same components

Assuming you don’t have a lap top you’ll have:

Inside

Computers are essentially quite simple.  Most of the “intelligence” lies in the Tower.  Inside the tower is a piece of electronics called the motherboard which houses something called the “processor”.  Now if that sounds complicated don’t worry, to use a computer you don’t need to understand anything about the motherboard or the processor.

My main reason for mentioning the processor is, it is always talked about when you buy a computer.  You could think of the processor as a giant calculator.  It adds numbers together very quickly.  The more numbers it can add per second the faster the processor; the faster the processor the faster the computer.

For most people an ultra fast processor won’t make a lot of difference.  You don’t need one when typing or using the internet.  They are useful however in games and other “calculation rich” scenarios.

To understand “calculation rich” you need to understand a little about how computers work in terms of software.  Software is the computer program that you use to perform tasks like word processing, browsing the internet, looking at email and so on.  These programs are a series of instructions to a computer.

If it is a word processor, the conversation between the program and the computer might be something like:

Computer: “Someone has pressed my ‘A’ key what do you want me to do?

Software: “Display this graphic on the screen”

Computer: “Okay done that”

This is repeated for every action that a user takes on the computer.  In practise there isn’t an actual conversation.  Instead the software and the computer “talk” using numbers.  You can think of it as their own language, like English, Spanish, French and so on.

Since the computer uses numbers to “talk” with the software it’s obviously important how fast it can deal with these numbers.  This is where the processor comes in.  If you think again of the processor as a big calculator the faster it can calculate or interpret the numbers the faster it can respond to the software.

Other Periphals

In addition to the computer the motherboard also houses a graphics card.  The graphics card is responsible for dealing with what you see on the screen.  In this computer tutorial I won’t go into the graphics card in detail.

However it is important to understand the role that the card plays in the response of the computer.  If you are doing “graphics intensive” activity, then you need a better graphics card.  The graphics card has extra bits on it to enable it to support the processor in getting things to the screen faster.  So if you play a lot of games or do a lot of drawing you need a better card.

In addition to the motherboard, processor and graphics card, the tower will normally include a hard drive.  This is where all your information is stored.  In this computer tutorial I won’t go into the workings of the hard drive.

It’s sufficient to think of the hard drive as being a filing system.  If you wrote on a piece of paper and filed it, then think of your computer doing the same.  When you type into a word processor your computer saves what you typed into its filing system which is the hard drive.  Not surprisingly it stores the information as numbers since this is the language it talks to software with.

However, unlike my paper filing system my computer files things in a way to enable it to find them again very fast.  It doesn’t spend hours looking for something!

No computer tutorial would be complete without mentioning something about peripherals.  These are the things like scanners and printers that you plug into your computer.  They don’t warrant a lot of explanation.  However if your going to have one thing as a peripheral then I’d buy a printer.  I love the idea of a paperless office but I still print out loads.

That completes this computer tutorial.  If you would like to comment on it them please email me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .  I'll add more on basic computer skills over the coming months so if you've ideas of what you'd like included please let me know.

If you'd like to return to the main learning page click this computer tutorial back link.