If You Can Cook You Can Code Vol 3: Learn Computer Hardware

1. Introduction: hi and welcome Teoh. If you can cook, you can code the hardware edition this course I created because I think that learning how to code learning how to program most people that learn how co learn how to program have been working with computers their entire lives since they were kids. They built their own computers. They gamed on their own computers. They were on the Internet with their computers. They were hacking around with things, just spent a lot of time on the computer as kids and in their teens. And so getting a job in the computer industry made a lot of sense, and it used a lot, utilize a lot of skills they already had. But if you don't come from that sort of background, looking at a computer like this could be really intimidating. And the, uh, I built my first computer in high school. I was really into Video editing and video editing is one of the most computer intensive skill applications. Besides stuff like either having a server where you're running a bunch of stuff on it, usually in a business context or gaming gaming is another huge way that a lot of people learn computers when they're younger. So I had that experience and I wanted to create this course because learning at a program a lot of times you don't need to understand the hardware, but it helps a lot to just get more comfortable with it. And it turns out that a computer inside is really not that complicated. It's kind of same. If somebody has never stepped into a kitchen before they step into the kitchen for the first time. And they're like, What are all these appliances? What are all these things? But you're gonna learn that Ah, Computer is actually not that complicated. There aren't that many different things going on and all the different cables, all the different connectors, the you know, looking at this mother board and all the different little shiny things on a capacitors, various plugs and inputs and outputs. There's not that much going on once you understand it. So put together this course because if you're somebody who's never opened up a computer before, I want to create something simple that in a few hours you can go from never having seen or understood any of this stuff to really understanding what's going on and being able to look inside any computer and be like, OK, I know what that's for, You know what that's for, and also, when you're coding to be able to understand what the hardware side of it is, and if you want to interact with hardware, Theo Internet of Things is one of the next big things, and that's about hardware three D printing in the next five or 10 years, the tools that you used to cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars toe manufacture your own components, those air things that are becoming much more available to people that are on a budget and even individuals and, ah, small Kickstarter like companies. So we're seeing a lot of innovation in this area. I just think it's really important for anyone who wants to learn how to code or even just be able to talk to other programmers for your leader. If you're an entrepreneur and you just want to be able to work with a technical person, it means a lot to understand what's going on inside a computer, and this stuff transfers over to a laptop to an iPad to an iPhone android, you name it all this stuff has the same basic components most of the time eso understanding what goes on inside a computer, how it works, how hardware works. You marry that together with software, and that's when you have a true understanding of how things work. So you're gonna get the same treatment that you're used to in other courses. In the If you can cook, you can code. Siri's where you're gonna learn all this stuff through the metaphor of the kitchen and how cooking works. So I'm excited to get start with this course and I hope to see you inside as always, make sure that you participate in the discussion section. Introduce yourself, tell me what you're trying to learn. I can direct you through and, uh, and help you find the content that's best suited for what you're trying to look learn. So I look forward to seeing in the course, and I'll see on the other side 2. My Story: Let me tell you a little bit more about my story and how I got into computers, how I got into programming and why I decided to teach this course. Most people who get into programmers and who are building their own computers. They're doing it for gaming and gaming is something I was into. Played a lot of halo with the original Xbox. Ah, lot of Halo two plate online, um, and played some computer really basic computer games when I was younger. Ah, a little bit of battlefield. My brother played a little bit of oblivion, and but it wasn't really. Gaming was never a big part of my life. What was a big part of my life was, um, filming things, making videos and doing special effects, editing things together. Always been fascinated by putting things together in a video format because I think it's such a powerful medium. And right as I was growing up was when really high quality video was coming down in price point to the range where anybody could afford to get into it and do some really cool stuff . So I decided I wanted to build my first computer as a video editing rig. And so that's a different, uh, there's a different set of requirements for that than for if you're building a gaming machine because things like graphics cards aren't usually as important, and what you're more concerned with is you have to have a lot of storage because video files take up a lot of space needed. Have things backed up. Um, and and you wanna have a fast processor and a lot of RAM so that you can be editing high definition footage each time you go a step up from standard definition 27 20 p. You're looking at four times as many pixels, even though you're just doubling the vertical dimension, doubling the horizontal, and then when you up to 10 80 p. Ah, it's not quite that much, but you're going up another big step when you get into two K in four K where it's about 2000 pixels tall, the frame or 4000 pixels told then that's, uh, that's a really serious amount of processing power that you need, and you also need to be able to get those read and write those files on a hard drive quick enough that you can play it at full speed, which is 30 either 24 or 30 frames per second. So, anyways, that's what got me into carrying enough toe. Learn about all this stuff because you can save quite a bit of money building your own computer. And I'm guessing for most of you you're not taking this course because you want to build your own computer. Um, and it turns out that the Dec's desktop, uh, the demand for desktop computers in general was just going down every year because people are using tablets, they're using phones, they're using laptops. So, uh, the great thing about computers in this case, especially is that they're big. There's there's a lot of room inside. There's a lot of empty space, so it's easier to film what's going on. Um, so I got into computers because I really wanted to know how to edit videos. I want to be able to the same kind of things that I saw in Hollywood movies. I wanted to be ableto create those at home on my own computer with my own camera, or at least approach that on just understanding how it was done and being able to do it myself. That was a real thrill, so I don't do a lot of intense video editing anymore. It's kind of a Layton skill that I have, but I only use it when there's ah specific project that calls for it. And I've also learned a lot of other things about video editing like, uh, how important music and audio is and other things in terms of cinematography and setting things up that I just didn't understand when I was younger. And those things don't have as much do with computers. I realized that a lot of video editors get overly dependent on technology, and they want to improve their technological skills instead of focusing on all the other stuff out there that has nothing to do with video editing or special effects that happens in the camera or before the camera even starts rolling. So I know you didn't take this course toe, hear me talk about video editing, but that's that's why I got into computers. And so that's part of what I'll be bringing in toe into this. I'm not going to be going crazy about gaming stuff and having multiple graphics cards, hooking them up together and stuff like that. But that's not a big deal. All the there actually aren't that many differences between building a great game and computer and building a great video editing computer. Part of what we're gonna talk about also is you have questions about Well, when I'm buying computer, what's more important, storage space ram or processor speed and how to think about all that. So we'll be getting intel that things computer right here is something that's my next video editing computer. So I just finished building this and this is taking over for the computer I built built 45 years ago. Um, and I'm gonna tell you how I built it. Um, I didn't spend a lot of money on it. I'll tell you how I chose between new and used parts and how to think about the whole process. So if you want to build that, you can. And also I think it's important to always be thinking entrepreneurially. So how much is each of these components worth? How do they had is their price change over time? And, uh, what's the difference between buying certain things used and knew how to think about all that stuff. It's really important to always have a have an idea. Whatever industry you're working with it in about how much stuff is worth, how much stuff costs gives you a lot of deeper understanding about how things work and why people make the decisions they do. So, uh, that's it? That's my story. Um, and we'll be getting well in the next session will be getting into a answering some of these basic questions that you probably have or you will have ones get more into this stuff about how the hardware side of computers work. And actually, one other thing is I volunteered. Um, and I still I still do it not is often, but I volunteered, Um, with this, uh, with this company that sends out Well, it's a nonprofit based in Massachusetts and they send out they take donated computers from companies, and usually there's something wrong with them. And so what we would do is get in these triage tents kind of like, uh, do you think about in the military? They have army tents for medics. So we bring in these computers, they have a problem with them, and so we take apart the computer, take out all the components, inventory them, figure out what was wrong with it. Put in a new hard drive, put the Lennox on and get it to boot up. Um, fill it with a bunch of bare bones components that are very inexpensive, but sending him out to different countries in Africa where we can set up a whole school, the whole computer center, and it's really valuable for the people over there. And there's a lot of kids that benefit and are able to learn technology through these computers. So I got a lot of experience through that, and I recommend if you have something in your area like that to go do that at least once or twice because it seeing a bunch of different computers and being able to generalize, kind of like a mechanic. Uh, they've probably haven't seen every car that's ever been made, but because they've seen so many different cars looked under the hood seen underneath, they can figure out where stuff is, even if something's shaped differently. Called a different name, um, they can figure out very quickly because they're able to generalize. So getting that experience looking at a bunch, different computers that will help you generalize in and really get this stuff a deeper level. 3. Introduction: in this section your get the answers to some basic questions about how computers work and how to think about computers. What's important when you're buying a computer? What sort of stuff? To look at these air, some sort of general things that are going to connect, how computers work in this hardware stuff with the questions and the experiences you've already had throughout your life with computers. And maybe you never got that deeper level understanding of what's going on there and so answering these questions going to do that I've got this computer right here and you may be wondering, Well, when are we can actually talk about the stuff inside this computer? Well, we're going to get to that in the next section. So if if that's something that you won't immediately jump into that, then go to the next section and then come back to this later on. Because each of the videos is just lectures is labeled by the title of what question I'm answering in that video. So if you want to skip over and go directly to that, um, bio means, but I'm gonna answer some questions here, and that may give you a better perspective of, uh, what you want to learn next. Maybe which one of those videos in the coming sections that you wanna look more into this course is is different than some of the other courses in the Siris in the sense that it's more modular, so you can skip through and and watch whatever videos look most interesting to you, and you're not gonna look lose much by doing that. So feel free to skip around. Look at the different components. Anything that sticks out to you that looks interesting. Feel free to check that out first and then come through and and fill in the gaps later on. But that being said I did put it in a chronological order that does make sense, starts with the most basic stuff and the most important things that kind of branches out to those components of hardware that aren't as important. So, um, it's if you're not leaning one way or the other, I recommend you just kind of go through it the way that I organized the course and without further do what's get into the questions 4. Whats Important When You Buy a Computer: The first question is what's important when you buy a computer and there's different uses for a computer. Sometimes you need a bunch of screens because you're doing financial trading stuff like that, and you need a little bit extra power for that. Sometimes you doing video editing. You need some extra processing power for that, Uh, sometimes your gaming and you want extra processing power for that. And that's really like heavy lifting. Where your building. If you think about a car versus a truck, you're building more of a truck. If you think about a kitchen, you're no longer talking about an industrial, uh, something you would put in a house. You're built, you're you're buying industrial equipment that's meant to take more of a beating and handle larger amounts of cooking foods. You might. Instead of having four burners, you might have six or eight burners might have a griddle there, instead of having ah, half fridge half freezer. It's gonna be one full, full height fridge and then a separate full height freezer. Uh, that's sort of stuff, Um, so that's but for most for most people's uses, you're just talking about doing office work and wanting things to be really quick, and a lot of it really comes down to Web browsing. So, uh, there's to waste. There's two different important areas. One is how fast is stuff When you have a lot of things going on that basically means How much can you multitask? How money can you have 20 tabs open with a bunch of different videos and not have to worry about stuff lagging? How fast to program start on your computer? How, uh, how long does it take to start the computer up, Put it into hibernate or sleep mode to bring it back, stuff like that? And then, uh, the other angle of it is how much storage spaces there. So if you've, if you're downloading a bunch of stuff or you're recording a bunch of videos, um, and you just need a lot of storage space for music, for videos, for pictures. Uh, you may take a lot of un compressed photos, raw photos. You may take a lot of high definition video, and so where do you put all that stuff? Ah, cloud storage is pretty cheap. You can get a terabyte for $10 a month, whether it's Dropbox or Google Drive, and that's probably changing, going to change pretty soon anyways, and it's really going towards unlimited. Ah, but the point is, that's another thing for you to think about. So when you're building a computer, you have to know how much storage space do I need? Where, uh, in terms of a kitchen, that would be your closet, your pantry? How much space do you need to be able to just put things away in various cabinets? Um, how much food do you have? How much pots and pans and appliances do you want to still away? And the short term thing is, if you're multitasking, you wanna have a big cutting board. You wanna have lots of space for you to cut things up. You won't have a big table or even a kind of bar situation where you can have tons of tables on just work, have tons of room and space to work on things and also a lot of room toe. Move around between those tables, so you're doing a lot of multitasking. You got a lot of browser windows open. Each of those is a task or a process so in the kitchen. Maybe you're working on Thanksgiving dinner, and so each of those different dishes you're putting together is a different process or different task. And so the ability of that chef in the kitchen or that cook to go around and do a bunch of different stuff and work on things has to do with number one. The CPU, which is the process, or the brain of the computer that's you can think by that, is the chef and the the chef's ability to just move around fast, do things quickly on. And then the other piece of it is the short term memory of the computer, the working memory of the computer, which is ram or random access memory. You can probably see that right there. If you're wondering what this big thing is, that's just Thea. That's the cooling heat sink for the CPU. So see pews get really hot. Same way Chef gets really hot in the kitchen easily in a in an industrial kitchen or in a restaurant kitchen over 100 degrees specially got a lot of grilling or hot ovens in there so things can overheat quickly and it's really important, Teoh cool down and you notice the chef's hat. It's got this long tube above and and in the same way Heat sings like this. Help they take the heat they distributed to these fins, these very thin pieces of metal and then air goes through it. And there's thes fans like you can see this fan right here that send air across. There's another fan port up here. I'm gonna add a fan there and that that will either bring in cold air inside or send hot air out the case. And so that's how, uh, you cool down a CPU. People who want to run their computers faster can do something called Over Clocking on. We'll talk more about that later. The question is what's important when you're buying computer? So having that combination of CPU and Ram is really important. If you're not doing stuff that that is that intense, the ram is going to matter more than the processor because the ram is keeping everything active when there's not enough space, it has to store things on the hard drive when it runs out of space on the in in Ram, and so that's what can slow things down, So you wanna have a lot of ram? So eight gigs, 16 gigs. 32 Gates of Ram. That's a general range to think of when you think about a new computer. RAM is a really smart place to invest in my extra money and processor. Having a fast processor doesn't make a whole. As much of a difference is having ram, and you can get CPI benchmarks and compare processor two processor s. Oh, really? Focus on the Ram and then just know how much storage space you need and get that storage eso. If you're building a computer like this, I recommend you buy your own hard drives because it's gonna be cheaper right now in terms of cost per gigabyte. Three gigabyte hard drives of the cheapest. But it used to be to venture. It's gonna be four. Then it will be probably five or six, and then I'll go to eight eso, which is a matter of time and things. That's how things progress in the industry. So, uh, those are the most important things to think about. Everything else is mostly secondary. As I said, if your gaming, then yeah, the graphics unit is gonna be very important. Go online and find people who have already built computers and look at the specifications they use. Make sure that if you're building from scratch, the mother board you're using is compatible with all the components. So there's a cycle PC part picker that will test that and make sure that everything is compatible for you. Um, but those air the those air really the most important things, figuring that stuff out and, ah, and just knowing how to spend your money. If you're getting something like a laptop, you're probably not building it yourself. And so when you're just picking between components, make sure that you get the right amount of RAM and look at when you have two or three different options. Go and look at the price difference and then compare that to the difference in performance . So, for example, with a CPU, you'll get benchmarks where it's a standardised measurement. One CPU will cost $100. The other one costs $200 but CPU A uh, it might have a benchmark rating of 2000 than the $200 1 will have a bench mark of 3000 so you're doubling the price, but you're not doubling the performance benchmark of that processor. What what that tells you is, What's the best bang for your buck? And when are you starting at the point of spending a lot of money just to get a little bit faster of a processor? It's like a race car. It's like you get a little bit of tiny extra bit of performance goes from 0 to 60 a tiny bit faster. Um, but you're paying a huge. You're paying thousands of dollars just to shave off 1/10 of a second. So that's that's where it gets into the same thing in the kitchen with really high end stuff. Unless you really know what you're doing, you probably don't need to be spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars on each appliance in your kitchen, each pot and pan that you have, Um, unless you really know what you're doing. So, uh, make sure paying attention that performance stuff, and then you can always upgrade almost anything later on. So it's not that big of the deal will be getting more into that kind of stuff in future videos 5. FAQ - How Can I Save Money When Building a Computer: Now let's talk about how to save money when you're building a computer. Uh, probably the single biggest thing you can do is just to buy used instead of buying new and a lot of people when they think of buying a used computer, use computer components. They think of use stuff in in other areas like used clothing, for example, or a used car and a lot of times of those sorts of things. There's a lot of rough and tumble. There's a lot of, uh, where that happens in friction that, uh, that really lowers the quality of the component over time. But with most computer components, they really they have a very long life and because they're inside a case and they're being kept at a at a safe temperature, nothing, for the most part, except for a few components like hard drives, hard drives, air really have the shortest lifespan of anything inside a computer. Except for hard drives, you really don't have to worry about most used components being significantly worse than something that's brand new eso. Usually what happens with components is, and I'm saying, except for hard drives, everything else except for hard drives. Usually what's gonna happen is you're gonna want to replace that because it's such old slow technology before it's going to just give out and die on you. So for the most part, uh, anything that's new, that's a computer component. It's gonna get to the point where you just don't want to use it anymore, because it's so slow before it actually dies on you. That's what's gonna happen the vast majority of the time. And what that means is, if you're buying something used the majority of time, it's going to be a good piece of equipment, and you're going to get the exact same performance as if you bought it new. And you're usually going to be able to save at least 25 sometimes 50% or even more on that piece of equipment. So you'll hear later about how I saved a lot of money on the computer, that the bigger black computer that I've been showing you, how I save money on that by finding the case on Craigslist. And then it turned out the guy had a few other components that he also wanted to sell at a steep discount, and this stuff was barely used. Here's the other big thing that people don't realize about used components, especially when you're going on eBay because eBay is really Craigslist. I don't I usually don't go there. I don't wanna have to go pick something up. Um, and so eBay is really the one stop shop. If you're buying, use components when a lot of people don't realize about new, uh, use stuff on eBay and whether that said, just a component for your desktop tower or it's an entire laptop. Uh, I have four younger brothers, and I'm always. I've always been in charge of picking out, helping them pick out their their laptops. And so I've learned a lot about how to get, uh, cheaper laptops on eBay by buying them used. And the trick to it really just comes down to understanding who was selling these used components. Thes used computers and components and the people that are selling a lot of laptops or businesses, their businesses that own a ton of laptops. They don't necessarily get used every day, and if they do get used, they're getting used in a business environment, or sometimes it's in a school environment for example, where they keep these computers locked away way and they may be yet an hour two of use each day and per week, maybe just a few hours. So even though they're used, they're not used in the same way that a consumer, uh, ownership is going to be using it. So what? I've been able to find just incredible deals, saving hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Just buying used eso is a huge advantage. And I'm just amazed when I get this stuff in the mail and I literally can't tell that it looks new. It looks like it just it literally just came out of the packaging. There's no dense, there's no bangs or bruises. And here's the other thing these companies that are selling thes. You used laptops. They usually have a return policy, so anything that you find is usually gonna fall apart within 30 days, or you just gonna find an issue and they're gonna resolve that for you. But I've never had that experience through all the computers that I've bought. Um, they've all turned out great, never had a problem with them. This one time I found these Net books and there were these great Net books for, I think, 100 $5200 each. And we bought. I think we ended up buying five or six of them for basically everyone in my family. And I still have one of them that I use every once in a while because it just has such great battery life. And when I want to do some right writing and really not have any distractions having a low power computer that could just type away on it's great. And I use that for writing my first book. So, um, it's something that still use, and that's something I got really cheaply off eBay, I think Twisted original prices probably $500 and we got it for 150 or 200 so you can just find some amazing deals on eBay. Thea Other thing is, I don't like doing auctions, and you probably don't either. Uh, the interesting thing about eBay is when it first came out, there was a lot of excitement about Wow, you can go online and do an auction and and get ah, bit on things, and that was a novelty But nowadays, on in the last several years, eBay's found that people using the buy it now feature are far outnumbering the amount of people that are bidding on things. And what I don't like about bidding on things is usually takes several days for each item, and then you're not sure uh, if you're gonna win it, so there's a lot of uncertainty there, and you can end up spending weeks just bidding on stuff and that those weeks that go buy are gonna impact your productivity. And it's also wasted time when you're when you're trying to bid on stuff. So what I do it on eBay is I look at you have to be signed into do this unless they've changed it recently. But you'll see a little check box on the left hand side that says completed listings and sold listings, and they'll show you exactly how much people are paying for whatever computer or component you're looking at. And so that's going to give you a really good idea of okay, if I did, if I if I got really lucky on ah on an auction and I got at the lowest price, this is what I would get it for for by now. I'll get it at this price and an average auction would be here. So the way I decide on whether I'm gonna bid or do a buy it now is I'll look at what is the difference between the average auction price and then what's the lowest? Buy it now? Price. And if it's only 2030 bucks, I'm not going to spend days and days trying to bid on something and just, you know, you could easily sink a couple hours into that. And it's just not worth your time when you talk about 2030 40 bucks. So that's how I approach it. The other thing is, are there certain times during the year, especially Black Friday when you can just get stuff cheaply and there's, uh, really great deal sites. So slick deals is probably the best one if you're just going to use one. They have great deals on computers, cameras, so if you're in the market for that, but you're not in a rush, Uh, you know, spend a couple months just checking that site for 30 seconds each day, scroll through and you can piece together and get some really good deals on stuff. So any time you're gonna be buying something that's more than 102 100 bucks usually pays toe toe wait for that sort of thing unless you're in a rush to buy that piece of equipment . So if you're looking at okay, I want to get a printer. Want to spend a couple 100 on it? Uh, I want to get a new laptop. I want to wait for the right deal. Then, uh, then just make sure you check sites like that every day and then pull the trigger and read the reviews. Um, underneath each deal, a lot of interesting insights from that also, uh, in terms of where to buy stuff new new egg for me has always had definitely had the best shipping by far. Even if used their free shipping, which they say is 4 to 7 days. I almost always get things within a day or two, and I've been really amazed at how quickly stuff comes. So, uh, the great thing about New egas they also almost always have the cheapest price, or it's within one or $2 of what you'll find on Amazon or other sites. So Newegg is really where I buy almost all my electronic stuff. Unless I'm gonna go to eBay to get something that's used. Uh, the other thing is, don't waste your time, uh, getting ah deciding between components. So a lot of people think the only cost is money, but there's other costs, and time is a major cost. So, uh, the time you you spend bidding on auctions or researching things that you can waste a lot of time that way. So I'll give you an example. I was looking for RAM for my new computer, and I was trying to compare. Well, what's the there were? I decided it was one or the other one was $70.1 was $80 and I started looking at Okay, what are the differences in speeds? Is this compatible? Are these both gonna be able to use both of the highest rated speeds on these four? My my mother board what the reviews on new eggs said say, and eventually I just thought, You know what? I'm just going to spend the extra $10 not spend it another second doing research on this because it just people spend way too much time researching, uh, certain purchases when there's the amount of gain. I mean, it pays to research, but you also have to be careful spending too much time on things that don't make a big difference. So spend the time on things that make the big difference. Don't spend time on things. They're gonna make a small difference. So if the difference is 5 10 15 20 bucks, don't spend half a Knauer an hour, two hours researching the differences. Just get the more expensive one and make a quick decision, and you're gonna feel better about it at the end of the day anyways. So, uh, so definitely use eBay, usually for more expensive stuff. Or if you want to get something that, like a cable, this happens quite a bit where sometimes you'll have ah, cable that have cost 20 or $30 like a a phone charger, and you can get on eBay for two or three bucks. Another thing about eBay that's interesting is you. Can you can get certain components really cheap from China, or you can get them a little bit more expensive from California. So Ah, and other parts of the country. Big port cities like New York. So what I do for that is something coming from China is usually going to take about three weeks, 3 to 4 weeks to get here. So you can sometimes get something like thes thes earbuds. I'm always losing earbuds. And, uh uh, you know, they just I've had a lot of bad experiences where they just get broken or I lose one of the little rubber pieces, and so I just I just buy a whole big bunch up. Let me just actually grab the bags and I'll show you. And the reason I do this is because these these things let it literally cost less. They cost a dollar each. So I think I got these in the mail, Uh, about a week ago. And this is like 10 or 15 I think, Yeah, it's about 10 earbuds, like headphones, and they're all exactly the same. Great thing about this is I can throw one or two of these in my backpack in a travel bag. I can leave one in the car. I I mean, and they work. Fine. So, um, so just stuff like that, you could you would probably have to pay for $5 for each of those if you bought him from a cell in the United States. So if you want something quickly like within a week and it's worth the extra couple bucks, then buy it from the left hand side. Just select the option that says only people only sellers in North America are only sellers in the United States, and usually you'll find the exact same thing is just a few dollars extra. So that's the strategy I use for buying like cheap components like headphones, USB adapters, stuff like that, cables HD and my cable's. This is the kind of stuff that eBay is really great for. So any sort of cheap, small component where, uh, retail stores, especially like a Best Buy or, you know, used to be Circuit City? Ah, Walgreen CVS. They'll sell a component like a cable that costs $2 to manufacture for 20 or $30. And so that's one of the best things to go on eBay for, because there's just really cheap stuff and you can be buying stuff from China where it's manufactured, and it's just super, super, super cheap. Another thing to do with that is, you know, order. When I started out, I just ordered one of these and I got it in the mail, tested out. See how it feels in that year. If it feels good immediately by five or 10 more of him and then you just have them, people will lose, lose their earbuds and, you know, I just have them. So it's just there really cheap, really easy to use. And it's, uh, it's solved the problem of just not be able to find them losing, Um uh, eso that's over all my strategy So amazon dot com really great for reviews. Newegg is really great for reviews. Eso reviews air also really important. Even if you're not going to buy something on Amazon or or even new way, let's say you're gonna buy it on. Uh, let's say you're gonna buy used processor like I did off eBay. Well, I'm gonna first read the reviews on new egg. Read the reviews on Amazon. Look at what the other suggested products are or equivalent products or products in the same price range where this person also bought this item that information is really useful . You can get that information for free from a new wag or in Amazon, and then you can take that and go buy it used on eBay. So these sites aren't useful just because you can buy stuff there, but also because you can get information there. So Slick deals is good for getting deals, finding deals. Sometimes they're on other sites, like Tiger Director, Best Buy or whatever. Um, Craigslist is good for stuff like I need another 24 inch display, but I didn't want to spend a lot of money on it, so I just found one on Craigslist. That was really cheap, so Craigslist could be good for certain bigger purchases. Um, that you're willing to travel for or the shipping would be fairly expensive. But for the most part of not using Craigslist, it's mostly eBay in New EG Amazon. Every once in a while, Amazon has a huge selection. Newegg has a huge selection, and then you can go to eBay and usually find it a little bit cheaper or a or you can even get it used, which is gonna be your best deal, usually so the major thing have to say is most of the time buying something new, it's gonna work out perfectly. So the amount of money you save buying used is more gonna make up for the one or two rare times when something may go wrong. And because thes sellers, especially on eBay, that their reputation to think about, they're usually more than willing toe work something out where they're you. Either you find a crack on something is cosmetic. You want them to refund you a certain amount five or 10 $20 from the purchase price or you want you want to send it back and get another one, or you just want them to send a replacement. Sometimes they won't even ask you to send it back. Eso there's ah, there's a lot to take advantage of in terms of saving money online, buying computer components. So I definitely recommend you check out all those sites 6. FAQ - What Kinds of Computers Are There: Here's another common question. What kind of computers are there? And in this course you're seeing desktop towers, those air sort of traditional computers. But there's tons of computers all over the world in in almost any conceivable location, but we don't call them computers. So I want to have this question in the course, just so you have a better understanding and can start toe generalize about what a computer is. Well, when you were in math class, you had a calculator that's a mini computer. Originally, a computer was not a word for a machine. It was a word for a human being that did a certain job. So what a computer is is somebody, uh, or the way the term used to be uses a computer with somebody who added and subtracted. Did math, uh, mathematical operations on numbers at its attractive multiply divide other stuff like that ? And so over time, as machines got the ability to do calculations, that word that label for a certain occupation for a person was transferred over to the machine. And now we assume now that label is stuck to the machine and that role of being a computer that as an occupation doesn't really exist anymore. So, uh, that's where the word originally comes from. But lets Gettinto uh, the main point of this question, you have the desktop tower. What? Turns out desktop towers are becoming less and less popular. You really need them as much anymore. You can get so much power inside Ah, laptop nowadays and even a tablet in a phone. I mean, we've got quiet core eight core phones nowadays. So, uh, there's fewer and fewer reasons why you would need a tower computer. Uh, and most people are using laptops, so laptop is another major type of computer, and computers keep on getting smaller. So in terms of smaller than a laptop, you have tablets, and you also have phones were getting even smaller now with wearables where watch where you have a little screen on the watch, so on. Then there's phablets, which is Ah, somewhere in between. A phone and a tablet is something about this size. You could consider just a very small tablet, but that's another type of computer, and basically there they work exactly the same. They have all the same components inside them as a regular desktop computer has. The only difference is it's all integrated in a very tight environment, and usually it's hard or impossible to go in and replace things. So this right here is my iPhone, and the thing about an iPhone that's kind of annoying is you can't take out the battery and put in a fresh battery. So if you're traveling, if you're on the road and you want to have multiple batteries, you can't do it. And, uh, and over time batteries, whether it's a laptop, a tablet, a phone, they lose their charge and not just lose their charge. But they lose their overall capacity so they can't hold is as much of a charges they used to when they were fresh out of the factory. And so either after send it to Apple And you don't have a phone for a couple weeks, or you can buy replacement battery off eBay or other sites and do it yourself. And because I like taking stuff apart, just seeing out works inside. I got this little kit for maybe 10 15 bucks. You get a little screwdriver that can unscrew those screws at the bottom of your iPhone, and then you can open up the phone and, uh, you can open up the phone and replace the battery. So these two screws right here, that a special pattern on them. So you have to Do you need a special screwdriver to be able to do that? Um, yeah. So, uh, so opening up the laptop opening up a phone or a tablet is difficult, if not impossible. And as they make these things smaller and smaller, it's more of an engineering challenge to fit everything in there. So it's kind of like once you get it in there, you don't really want to have to take it back out. People. Most people aren't interested in replacing components. They're just gonna buy a whole new computer. And that's what companies want. Also, they don't want people just going out and buying a component and keeping their device alive longer. You want people to use it for a few years, and then I feel like it's too slow and by the next version of whatever with the additional bells and whistles, So there's really less and less and less focus on taking things apart, understanding how they work inside, and so that's why this course is so important. Another type of computer now going in the opposite direction is computers that are bigger than your average tower. So those are for the most part. Servers and servers are just like in a restaurant. You have a server, so somebody that brings out your food and delivers it to you. So the idea of a server is thing about any website. How did those files get to your computer any time you're seeing a website? That's a data that the website sent to you. And when we say the website sent it to you, Really? What happened is that data is sitting on a server, which is just a computer. Just It could be just like a tower computer. You could even use a laptop as a makeshift server. Um, it's just holding those files there, and then it delivers those files to you when you go to that website when you type in the URL. So that's how servers work. And in big data centers like a Facebook Google, what they do is they have these cabinets and the cabinets air 19 inches wide, just about a foot and 1/2 wide and they're these cabinets and a good way to visualize it is . Imagine a file cabinet. A regular 45 door drawer file Cabinet file Cabinet needs to be wide enough to hold a piece of paper, which is 11 inches wide, so file cabin is usually to be 13 14 inches wide. So think about it. If you add a couple extra inches on each side of that file cabinet, that's how wide a serve Iraq is gonna be. And these racks actually aren't just used for computers. They're also used for audio equipment and video equipment. So if you go into a big home that has a home theater system, for example, they're gonna have all the different pieces inside set up like that. If you go to a big rock concert, they're gonna have all the audio equipment. I remember when I was volunteering at the local TV station and we had a big truck, uh, that handle the switches and equipment in it and would beam up Thea the signal so people could watch the local football sports games. Town meeting, etcetera. Uh, it had all these racks ing and racks inside the truck, and those were all a standard size, and computers use that same standard size. You have a cabinet that's about six feet tall, sometimes a little bit taller, and it's just computers, and they usually don't have a screen. It's just a computer and obvious. And most of time they don't even need a screen. So you can access those servers from somewhere else using Ethernet cables and a network. And the next level above that is when you're connecting multiple computers. So when you hear something like a supercomputer like Deep Blue that went on, um, that went on jeopardy. That's a super computer. And what that means is, is multiple computers connected together acting as one? So that's the way you really build a lot of power inside a computer, and, uh, or or if you want something that can do more than, uh, the work of one computer you need toe combine. Those resource is, and one interesting application of that is is the way Google builds a lot of their data centers. They found that the cheapest way to do it is to take a bunch of really cheap, oftentimes used components, used computers, used computer cases, hard drives, and what they do is they just put them together in these huge warehouses, and they build these supercomputers. They have just hundreds and hundreds of thes cheap towers connected together, and what they do is they designed their system, their data storage systems so that multiple hard drives, multiple servers or computers or towers can fail at the same time. And because there's enough backup copies of the data, uh, everything will go off without a hitch, and they won't lose data. So that's one of the applications. Ways of ways of using technology toe combine computers together, but that gives you an idea of what kind of computers air out there. Wearables are the next big thing. Building technology into, like rumor, Google Glass and having a little computer inside your glasses. We're seeing with Oculus rift with virtual reality and its covers, your eyes and you, you know you could go in a different place. Video game consoles. That's another example. Computer. Why did appliances in your kitchen have little computers in your microwave? Has a little computer in it. Your your ah, your fridge may have a little computer in it and fridges will TV screen or a fridge that can order food for you. Uh, more and more stuff in our homes are getting little computers built into them because it just gives them more functionality. Cars. A car is another example of a computer Any any, uh, any computer. I mean, any car built, I'd say in the late eighties or any time in nineties, two thousands gonna have a computer in it. You can get a special thing that reads the data off the internal computer in your car and gives you a ton of data. Um, and you see, with Tesla, Tesla is the first car company that was built by somebody who was native to computers and really understood them. And so you see you on musk. Just doing amazing things with the Tesla's, uh like has the huge screen inside the middle of the console, and he doesn't think about in the same way other car companies do. So he really stresses the idea of this car is a computer and eventually with self driving cars which are already being tested and are out in limited in in limited versions. In terms of they can they have lane assist they can parallel park for you stuff like that. But we're getting to the point where automatic automatic driverless cars is gonna be reality within about five years. So, uh, a car is a computer, and especially with the self driving cars, it's a huge new development in terms of how we use computers. So there's computers all over the place, and people tend to not see things as computers. They don't see their television as a computer. They don't see their radio as a computer. But all of these things air computers. And when you take him apart and you're looking at the actual circuit board, you really start to see the similarity. So that's why I really want to stress in this course that you get to see inside the computer, see the circuit board and see how similar the components are, how they work together. So and I also how we recommend that, um, you take apart year old year old stuff. So if you're in a throw away, a laptop or desktop computer taken apart, um, take apart an old TV, get the screwdriver out, or just, you know, do whatever you have to do to get that case open and look at what's inside and try to understand what's going on. If you have an old printer, take it apart. Find the circuit board, find the wires. You're gonna start to see the commonalities. Old cell phone. Just take it apart. Just look at it and start to understand how the same thing show up in all these different places. It really will open up your eyes toe how computers work and how the various components inside work. Final thing I'll leave you with is check out sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, where people are building their own versions of laptops, phones, tablets without, um, without manufacturers, you don't need a huge factor anymore. Necessarily. Teoh build a laptop that can have replaceable features or replaceable hardware. So same thing with a cell phone. So, uh, sites like Kickstarter, where you can bring a bunch of backers together and fund something without a big bank or big investors. We're seeing a lot of innovation and hardware that we just we didn't have. The technology prices hadn't come down enough until relatively recently to make this sort of stuff possible. So this is an area to keep your eyes on because there's just gonna be especially three D printers. The sky is really the limit, and we're still at the very early stages in terms of seeing what small companies can create in terms of hardware and even individuals with three D printers. So we're really just at the beginning stages. Definitely keep your eyes out for the future, especially in terms of phones, tablets and cell phones for the kind of new technology where just entrepreneurs and a team of a few people can come together and build really interesting hardware, and this is where you start. 7. FAQ - How Hard is it to Build a Computer and Where Can I Get Free Help: another big question with computers, and you're probably asking this yourself this in the back your mind as you're watching this and, um, hearing about all the different types computers, and you see a bunch more on that later sections is how hard is it really to build a computer, and where can I get help? Eso. It can be kind of complex in the beginning, because there's a lot of different formats. There's a lot of acronyms. It's not always clear what works with what and sometimes the specifications that a company gives. You aren't accurate or there's things that are missing from it, and it's ambiguous. So, uh, I really have two pieces of advice for you. First of all, it's not as hard as it seems, and it's a lot easier nowadays than it used to be. Computer components and manufacturers are getting better and better at just designing things well and making sure things work together properly. For example, if a mother board Onley supports a certain speed for for memory, that memory will support can run at multiple speeds, so may run at a lower than the highest speed, it can go like what a school buses have a speed limit governor, where they can't go higher than 55 or 60 degree 60 miles an hour. So that engine can go a lot faster. But it's got a governor on it. So if a mother boar dis is slower, but the memory is faster, that memory can come down and work at the slower speed, and so they're not gonna be completely incompatible. So that's the sort of stuff you sometimes have to think about. But really, the first place to go is PC parts picker. This is a website where you can plug in what memory want to use, what mother board you want to use and all the other components processor. And it'll tell you whether those parts are compatible or not really, really useful. This This wasn't around when I was first building my first computer, and I've used it to build my new one, and it's worked out perfectly. They also give you recommendations. You can search for Onley. You can search. Let's say you pick a mother boarding. You're looking for your memory. You can just to look at the memory that's compatible with your computer, so you're not looking through a bunch of extraneous results. Then you can see how much that costs at the lowest retailer, so they'll take Newegg Amazon. Bunch of other websites show you the cheapest price, and then also, they'll show you the ratings for that out of five stars for each of those components and for each year, options for each component. So PC parts picker is huge. Um, and then also, as I was saying before Amazon and Newegg, they both have a ton that the best places online to find reviews. So check out those websites and read the reviews, and then go and make your purchase wherever it's cheapest. But I do highly recommend new egg. If, uh, if you want stuff, get shipped free and very quickly, the other thing is where to get free help. Well, the best thing to do is just go on an online forum. There's tons of forms out there for people that are building computers. Computer enthusiasts. Great thing about PC Picker is that parts pickers, that they have a way for people to show what their computer build is, take pictures of it and then also list all their components. So you can see what components other people are using, and you can model your build off somebody else's build once you pick a case, once you pick a mother board or certain processor, then you can just throw that into Google and you'll see a bunch of people that have done a build with that. So you could put in the name of the processor, for example, and then just put the keyword build and then maybe forum or something like that. Put that into Google Search and you're gonna get a ton of examples, and that's a great way to find people that have already built a computer. And then once you find a popular forum, just post what your what? Your idea is what you're going for. How much money want to spend, what components you've already decided on which ones you're debating between which ones you have no idea compatibility issues, and you'll get some really great advice. Eso It's definitely anything related to computers of programming. It's probably the easiest subject to get free help with on the Internet. Cause makes sense. People that are into computers into programming. They spend time on the Internet already It's kind of like a second home to them, so you're going to be able to find a lot of free help very easily. So it's really it's not one of those things. In a lot of other areas, things you're learning could be tough to find. Active forms online where people are talking and helping each other. But anything related computer hardware software really easy to find free help, so you're not gonna have a problem with that. So, uh, use PC parts picker to make sure stuff is compatible. Read the reviews on Amazon and Newegg. Sometimes people in Newegg and Amazon will tell you their entire build and then just do some basic Google searching for people using the same components you are in. A build check out there builds, and you'll discover which forms of the best based on what sort of thing you're after. Like if you're building and audios. You know, if you're an audio producer music producer, you go to that type of form. If you're really into networking or servers to go to that form gaming, you go to a different form, so there's gonna be different forms for different uses. You're gonna find those very quickly with your Google searching and then just create an account. Post a question and you should be getting help in no time. And just make sure to give people in your post is be polite about it and just give them a smudge information as you can so that they can give you help. And they don't have to ask you clarifying questions. They don't have to ask you for more information. Really. Try to put it all. They're put in organized format. People appreciate it, and you'll get some really high quality help for free. 8. FAQ - What Makes a Computer Fast: One of the biggest questions people have is what makes a computer fast. What are the important factors in the performance of a computer? And this is a similar question. Teoh. Well, what matters in the kitchen? Where should you invest your money? So the first thing is to recognize that it's not all about the equipment it's all about. It's also about how you use the hardware that you have and also what operating system you're using. So this applies in the kitchen also, if you're use it, if you have really high end tools, but you're not using them properly, you can cause them to go bad a lot faster, for example, and knife. If you're not constantly sharpening that knife, you will eventually have to bring it back. It's not gonna cut us quickly. It's not gonna cut as well. It's not gonna It's gonna be more dangerous. You're more likely to cut yourself, and then you're not to spend money to bring it to a professional toe. Have them sharpen it because what happens with the blade over time is you just can't get any. You can't continue to sharpen it by hand forever. You need to take it to a professional. So with a computer with performance, what you're looking at is at the beginning, you're looking at things like What kind of hard drive is it that's going to tell you how fast applications air gonna load, how fast the computer is going to turn on and up, You know, Windows or apple or whatever to get to the point where you log into your computer? Uh, standard. Solid state drives are significantly faster than regular hard drives, so that's one way you can increase performance. Another big way is having a faster processor. So having multi threaded processor with multiple cores that's good and also having something with just a higher clock speed. So two gigahertz, three gigahertz, four gigahertz. If you want to add liquid cooling or another sort of cooling system, you can over clock that processor. That just means running it faster than the rated speed that it's that it's that they recommend for it. So those are important also memory. So what? You have four gigabytes, eight gigabytes, 16 32 gigabytes of ram. That's as we you'll learn more about. It's like the amount of counter space you have in your kitchen. So the more counter space you have, the more different things you can have out and be working on. At the same time, you don't have a lot of counter space than things get really cramped. You can only do one thing at a time, so it takes longer to get stuff done. Besides RAM, you also have we talked about processor RAM, hard drive and cooling. Uh, those were really the main things. There's other things, like graphics card that comes into play when your gaming and for certain graphics programs three D rendering two D special effects. But for the most part, those are the three major things. Other things to look at are the operating system. So, uh, Apple specifically chooses hardware to match their operating system and their software, and that means that they can have. If you take two equal computers, the Apple computer's gonna run better because they design it from the ground up to work with that hardware. Same thing with an Xbox or a PS two or GameCube, all the that type of stuff or a handheld or a ah phone. They're designing things to work on a specific set of hardware specific. A combination of a processor, ah, hard drive memory and other stuff and so they can tweak it to get the maximum out of it. But if you're designing something that's gonna run on a ton of different types computers, you can optimize it in that way. So there's certain situations where you can optimize for a specific hardware set up, and that's gonna get you much better performance if you have toe meet a broad set of specifications. Another big thing is the amount of fragmentation on your hard drive. So what this means is go back to the kitchen example. What say you just built a new kitchen or you're moving into a new house or apartment? So there's nothing in any of the cabinets. So you can you go to the grocery store, you buy stuff and you think, Okay, I kind of know where I'm gonna organize everything, and, uh, you haven't completely filled up all the cabinets. There's lots of space. Nothing's crowded. You know where everything is. So as the months and the years go by, you add more stuff. Stuff gets old, but it's in the back of the Cabinet. There's just ah, a bunch of stuff and it's unorganized, and it's taking up almost all the space inside those cabinets. Well, that's what fragmentation is. It's when you have a bunch of different files and we're talking thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of files on a hard drive. And they're all scattered all over the place. The way the on a regular hard drive, the way the data is stored is on a disk thing, like a pizza. And so you have the different ingredients on the pizza, meaning the different toppings. Those represent different files. You have those sprinkled around the hard drive. Now, when you're when you're first writing data onto a blank, hard drive, it's gonna place those toppings in sequence. So think of a spiral of Let's say, or just take a slice. And just on that one slice is gonna be just pepperoni and everything else is just cheese. So that's blank space on the hard drive. The next slice is just sausage. Next slices, just peppers. The next slice is just onions, whatever, but as time goes buys, you do eat certain files and you put new files on there well, all the big slices of blank space have been used up, so the only space that's available is where you removed one of those toppings. And so over time the pizza gets more more scattered and unorganized, and you no longer see those definite boundaries of the slices. It's just a bunch of stuff scattered all over the place. So with fragmentation, what happens is as you use that hard drive over the months and years, the files on the hard drive get more, more disorganized. And, of course, your folders and your folder structure can be highly organized. But on the disc itself, meaning where the computer decides to put the data on that hard drive, it can be very unorganized. And what that means is it takes longer for the arm that's in the in the computer. I mean, in the hard drive, think about like an old record player and has that one arm and it reads data. Well, the arm inside a hard drive is just go. The discus spinning like this, and then the arm can just pick up one file. So imagine if you have a pizza going rotating like this, and you have an arm that can go out and pick one topping off of that pizza, and that's like loading up one file. Now let's say you're loading up a program like photo Shop that has hundreds of files that need to be loaded before it's ready to go when you can start using it so that you can imagine that arm going around the pizza and picking up all those little files it needs so that it can start photo shop up. Well, if all those files are in one place on the hard drive, it can do that very quickly. But if they're all in random places along that platter, that magnetic platter inside the hard drive, then it's gonna take a lot longer to load up that data. So one of things you can do is just get an application that defrag the hard drive. But it's also benefit you're just going to get when you're using a blind car driver in new hard drive. One of the advantages of solid state drives is there much better at random access. So with with a regular spinning hard drive with a platter in it, you're the it's spinning and arm has to go around and find the data. And so if data is in a sequence where it can read it off like it's in a spiral motion that's very efficient, very fast, whereas in if it's just scattered randomly, that's a lot slower in a solid state drive, that's it's is basically the equivalent of like a wittle USB flash drive. Or and it's kind of it's actually fairly similar to RAM that you're using your random access memory in your computer. When it says four gigs, eight gigs, 16 gigs of RAM or of memory, that's what they're talking about. That's random access memory. It can randomly access things very quickly. So a solid state drive gives you that higher level of performance. And so that's why when you're building a computer or you wanna upgrade your computer, whatever hard drive you store, the operating system files on and all your applications talking Photoshopped, word, Excel, power point, chrome, whatever it is, all those applications and that operating system should be on a solid state drive that's going to give you a big boost in performance. So those are the major things that decide how fast your computer is people like to think about cores and multi threading. The one thing to remember about that is most applications aren't designed to take full advantage of those. So you may have. You may have four course or eight cores, but most applications are just gonna be able to run on one of those courts, so you're not going to get the full advantage most of the time, so make sure you really do your research to make sure that the way you're planning on using your computer is going to be able to take advantage of the that those multiple course. 9. Power Supply: in this video, we're gonna be talking about about power supplies. The power supply in your body is your heart, and that's pumping the blood through and providing oxygen. Sending that glucose, the energy that your body uses to move muscles basically do everything in the kitchen. You've got electricity, and then you've also got gas. If you've got a gas burning stove, those the two main ways that you provide energy toe although appliances inside a kitchen, then obviously the chef is running on their own, um, their own power and that all the food they're eating is turning into protein. It's turning into glucose, and that's what they're using to power themselves. So, uh, these in this video, we're gonna take a look at the power supply inside the computer. And we already touched on this briefly when we looked at the mother board. But now let's take another look. So, down here, you see all these cables. All these cables are coming out of this one power supply right here. They're actually coming out of just a small hole inside there, right there. Small hole. All these tables come out of that little hole right there and way. Turn around the computer to the back for a second. You can see the power supply from the back. So you're always going to see the same three prawn connector here to see the on off switch . So this is on that's off. Zero is always off. So no, let's take a look at the different wires. Different power wires that come out of the power supply, one sec. So the first important one is this. This goes right into the mother board. See if the widest one has a bunch different colors. This one also goes into the mother board. And you see, it has, uh, the possibility of either putting in six pins or eight pins. Focus that that's the six. And then you can add that one to add an eighth. So these two are going to go to the mother board. Then you have additional of these. You have more of thes and different power supplies supplies going to give you a different number. You need more than one of these. You can see their PC. I e. You need these to power certain PC. I extenders like a graphics card. If you have two graphics card. It's a gaming machine. You need two of these Just for that might need 1/3 1 for something else you're adding on that needs extra power. And then these two are going to go to your mother board. So, uh, that's what all of these air for, and sometimes you can find adapters to turn this into one of the other kind of power adapters. So these air kind of one type, they have a specific use. Then there's two other type main types. Um, this one right here is Molex. So you see, it's not It doesn't have square edges. Uh, the edges are. Those corners are cut on one on one side. It's so that's a molex right there. And the reason why I don't like thes and why they're they've been replaced is because they don't, um, and you can see what the other end looks like. This is the female, and this right here is the mail. That's the mail. That's the female right there. And so these the's pins don't always go in right, and they get get stuck, they can get bent off to aside. So they're not is easy to use as the new connectors. Which are these ones? The sadder. So these ones are in an L shape. You can see that notch right here. And that makes it very easy to make sure that you're putting it in in the right direction. So, uh, there's one final one. We're actually right here. That connector, and that one has special use that goes into a, uh, into a floppy drive So you don't usually need one of these anymore. Can be handed, Have a floppy drive. Um, sometimes you needed boots, boots, um, boot off of a floppy drive. But you don't see these quantities anymore. And that's basically all there is to a power supplies. You have those, um, these types of connectors thes air, the old fashioned ones and saddle ones are the newer ones. And there's actually, uh, I have one more thing to show you. I'll go grab that, and it's a ah, it's Ah, it's an adapter that turns a molex into a sadhus. I'll go grab that. - All right, I've got a whole second set of power cables to show you right here. And, uh, a couple different things. So this is just a extender and it's an extender, but it also splits off. So it it, uh, it would just attach on to the end and then coming off of it is a fan power. So it's two men on that. So fan connectors just gonna have those two pins inside of it. It has these two notches right here and right here and those notches. Make sure you put it in in the right way. So the idea behind this connector is because a fan takes such a small amount of power, you can just siphon off a tiny stream of power to go to the fan and then use this connector like e normally would. Next one will look at is another extender. This one's first Satya. So you can see the two mail ins here. You don't see these ones very often because usually this is this end is just coming out of the back of a hard drive. This is the female and that you would plug into, like, a hard drive or an optical drive so you can see the power right here and then the data. And these two are connected together. They're usually not like that you can see the power right here. The data right here. So the power is actually the power the way it's coming in. You can see the four cables are exactly the same size before cables going in. And they're the same color. Even though this is, um elex and thats sad of power right there. They both have the same cables going in, So it's just a different connector that, uh, that's easier to use. This one's the newer one. So this is just an extension cable. If you don't have, if the cable you're using isn't long enough, and then there's these one end of this is Molex. One end of this is Satya. So this just converts molex to sadist. So usually you'll have to. And this one's this one converts one molex to to satya salt. Zoom out for this This cable you can use an extra Molex connector. What's just pulling out right here in the computer? You have one of these that's not doing anything. You're not using any of these connectors. We just plugged. Emelec's in. See, putting it together is not always easy. I'm gonna put this putting it together. Is not always easy cause CEO see that one of those is kind of bent off to the side and it's not straight. So when you're putting them together, you have to wiggle it around just right to get it to fit in there. So that's why these are really annoying to use. And that's that right there gives you the equivalent of a satyr connector. So this Satya connector right here with these things Sata cable here with two connectors. You can get the same thing with this and use Emelec's to power so you can get these sort of adapter cables really cheaply. And they allow you Teoh connect more. Ah, you know, whether it's optical drives or hard drives using these molex connectors because it's it's the exact same power going through it. Um, so this one has one coming off of it. This one has to satya coming off of it. So I just want to show you those connectors he have a sense of even if you don't have, um okay, I want to show you those. So even if you don't have the exact amount of Sata connectors you want, you have a bunch of extra molex you're not using. You can just convert them over very easily. And, uh, and so you don't have to have the exact number of connectors that you want right out of the gate. With the power supply that you bought, you can always adapt them from one format, uh, connector to the other. And it's not a big deal. So that's how our power supplies work. Um, it and ah, and that's it for this video, so I'll see in the next one. 10. The Brain of Your Computer aka The CPU: in this video, we're gonna talk about C P use. So the CPU is this little thing right here. This is the brain of the computer. This is like the chef, and you want to be really careful with this thing. It goes inside the mother board. It's like the chef. It's the one that's doing all the work at the end of the day. So, uh, I'm gonna take the camera hand held against that. You can get a look at this thing. So we're looking up top at the computer. There's the power supply looking at it upside down, right side up for you. Um, and we're looking at the CPU, so that's where the CPU plugs. In previous videos, you've seen the heat sink above this heat sink. You've seen the top of the heat sink just sitting there like that. So we've taken the heat sink off, and we're looking at the CPU. No. So it's got this little thing that keeps it snug in there. This little arm, take that little arm, you pull it out and it's stay snug right in there. If you want to take the CPI well, you just pull that he can see the little pins. That's a CPU, and it's got those random, different missing pins so that you can can't accidentally put it in in the wrong way. So those little nubs correspond with the missing pieces here. This is the brain of the computer, and you can see they don't do much in terms of design here because they're not worried about you seeing it, because it's always gonna be covered. So I want a match up, match them up like that and flip it over and just very gently what it fall into place. And there's also going to be one corner of the CPU that has gold on it. To see that corner as gold, the other corners air just green. You can see on the mother board. There's a tiny little triangle right there. Focus in on that for you. So there's the gold triangle, and there's a little triangle on the mother board and see the other corners. Don't have that to the the other corners don't have that. So that's how you know you're putting it on in the right direction. You have the gold corner called Triangle on a matches up with that little triangle there. Once you do that, you take this, push it in. No problems. Then you take your heat sink and you mount that heat sink on top. So that's really it for the CPU. There's not a lot to look at. Every CPU is gonna look almost exactly the same. Um, the important bit is a m D. You can see the A M D right there is whether it's a M d or its intel. Those are the two big companies and a M d is not gonna AMG processor isn't gonna fit inside an Intel mother board. So a major decision you have to make right at the beginning is what kind of mother board am I going to get? And that's based on the kind of CPU you're going to get a lot of times, and I'm gonna put this camera back on the stands now, A lot of times, uh, you're gonna be able to get an A M D processor at the same level. That's a little bit cheaper than the intel. So intel is kind of the name brand kind, like IBM, the company that you know every company is gonna go for it. It's It's it's the leading brand. But am D you can get for the same price. You can get something faster or you get something at the same speed for a little bit, spending a little bit less So this processor right here, I think, was about 100 bucks. Uh, 110 20 new. But I was able to get this used off eBay for about 80 bucks, and it just came in a plastic container with this. Ah, processor, this bear processor inside it. I just took it out, put it in, and it worked beautifully. So people are really scared to just go into their computer and start touching stuff and working with it. They're afraid that they're gonna break something. Uh, but it's It's actually pretty tough to do that as long as you're careful. It's pretty tough to mess things up because, as you've seen as we've gone through this course and you'll see in later videos also, they purposefully make the connection the interface between any two things. They make it so that it can only go together in one way. There aren't multiple ways to connect the two pieces eso It's really hard to mess stuff up like that. And, uh, you're always gonna have the mother board manual, which is going to tell you how to plug everything into your motherboards. So your main decision when you're building a computer is which kind of CPU am I going to use? And then, uh, that has to go into the equation of what kind of mother board you're going to get. The downside of using a M D is that sometimes there's applications that only work on Intel . Don't work with a M D. They're pretty rare. It's usually only if you're doing advanced kind of stuff. Um, So, like, if you're doing programming or development type stuff, you're doing certain audio video, certain operating systems than the architecture of the, uh, the processor is gonna make a difference. Eso if you if you want to avoid stuff like that, it's usually just spend a little bit extra money and you can get the intel one. The reason I went with a M D is because I was originally just looking for a case, and I saw this case on Craigslist. It was basically new, been used like one for maybe a month. And the guy said, Hey, I have a mother board. Um, I have What else came with this? I had he had the power supply. And so I thought, you know what? My last computer was an intel. Um, I'm gonna see what happens within a m. D and tested out, see what it's like. So I ended up just going using the mother board bought the processor, and it's worked really well so far. So, um, I don't have any complaints. I haven't noticed any differences between intel and am D. Um, but it wasn't something where I needed to build a super powerful computer. The video editing I'm doing right now is 7 20 p and 10 80 p. House building something for, ah, really intense graphics doing a lot of special effects. Then I would have gone with a fat, more high end rig. But I just don't need that for this. So, um, the other thing when you're looking at CP use is the amount of cores in it, So this has six cores in it, and ah, and the thing, anytime you see something that has six cores or eight cores in it. Ah, lot of times what they're doing is is really starting with half assed many cores and then using software some sort of virtual ization to double that number. So if it as if it said the marketing speak is it has six cores. That means it actually has three cores, three riel course. And and so the other thing about courses is ideally, it's like having instead of having one chef. It's like having three chefs, and they can each be doing different things at the same time. But most of the time, when you're using a computer and it's it's called multi threading, so you would have three different threats, meaning instead of having one chef cooking the appetizer or the entree and the dessert all at the same time, they only have two hands. You have three different chefs, ones working on the appetizer ones on the own tray ones on the desert, and ideally, that's a lot more efficient. But for a lot of tasks that you're doing, there's no way to split it up into thirds and splitting up 2/3 might not save you any time . So what say you're cooking a steak and putting in the oven. Well, having three ovens doesn't cook that steak any faster. Tripling the temperature isn't gonna work either. You're just gonna have the inside uncooked in the outside, burnt and charred. So there's certain processes and actually the majority of processes you're not gonna be able to cut the time in in tow down to 1/3 by just throwing more energy or more power at it . What you can do is you can cut up that stake into three pieces, and those smaller pieces will cook faster, but probably not three times faster. So it turns out that the majority of what you're doing on your computer usually can't be cut up into thirds easily and done in 1/3 of the time. So, uh, so having a multi threaded set up is rare, and it's usually specific applications of your rendering video, and it's very easy to tiu. Render split up the frames into three parts and do it like that, or your rendering to three different formats. That's a That's a situation where you could use multi threading and get an advantage out of it. But don't just assume that because it has multiple cores, and it can do multi threading that it's gonna be able to fully utilize that the majority of the time, I'd say 80 90% of the time, especially if you're just doing office type stuff. It's not gonna make a big difference. So what that means is, if you've got ah, high intensity application, you think about using and building a computer around that, make sure you do your research ahead of time and figure out. Does having multiple cores and your processor gonna help you or not? Can you use them or not? Sometimes, uh, a certain program will only be able to use two cores or four course. So even if you have eight cores, it can only use four. So you're not getting any extra benefit out of those additional cores or very minimal. So make sure you do your research to find out whether you're actually going to get ah benefit. That's commensurate with the additional processing power and additional dollars that you're throwing out because most of the time it's not gonna make a difference. So really, make sure you do your research there, Um, and then on cooling. So the reason we talk about cooling is because of, uh, is because you need to cool anyways. But if you want to get more performance out of a CPU and also for graphics cards, you can do something called Over Clocking so over clocking is is kind of like in the in the in the kitchen. Somebody's moving at a normal pace for them, and some people's normal pace of doing things like some people in the city walk faster than people out in the country out in a rural area. So that sort of thing. So everybody different chefs are gonna move at different speeds. Chef that moves moves faster is like a CPU that's clocked at a higher rate, and the rate they use is called gigahertz, really back in the day. Really old computers, like a little handout calculator you might have would be measured in megahertz mega meaning one million giga, meaning one billion eso gigahertz is billions per second. Hertz is per second, So gigahertz one Giger hurt means a 1,000,000,000 of those processing units air happening per second. Eso graphic A CPU that has two gigahertz. That's 2,000,000,003 gigahertz, three billion, uh, and So when you're doing your research, you're gonna notice. Okay, that two gigahertz processor costs $200 but the three gigahertz processor costs $400 so I'm paying 100 more dollars. But I'm not getting the same sort of boost. So when you're looking at different processors, you want to look at CP benchmark, and what that does is they run the same exact test. It's kind of like the NFL. Combine where or you ask somebody in the kitchen toe. Cook an egg and you want. And that's one of the best ways. To tell how good a chef is is just how they do scrambled eggs or how they cook an egg. Because it's it's a very basic task, but it it shows you a lot about how somebody cooks. So anyways, when you test all these different CP use with the exact same test, you get a number. And just using the amount of gigahertz is not very accurate. It's It doesn't always give you an accurate reading of how fast that processor is. It's a rough estimate, but it's not perfect. So ah, better way to test them is used. The CPU benchmarks and then compare that with how much money you're spending on that CPU and find that sweet spot and then you can always upgrade later on. So think about upgrading is Sometimes it makes sense to just upgrade everything rather than upgrading one component. Because if you want to use faster memory, you're gonna want to go with DDR three. Not DDR two, and you'll see that we talked about that in another video, but sometimes makes sense to upgrade the mother board. Upgrade the CPU, the memory, the graphics card, everything at once. So I make sure you're not thinking, Oh, I'll just upgrade the processor because if you wait two or three year, four years to go by, it may be time to upgrade a bunch of other stuff also. So just think about how much processing speed you want, where that sweet spot is, and then how much you can over clock and how much extra it's gonna cost to cool that processor downs you can over clock it, cause you can take a processor that runs at three gigahertz, and you can over clock it to 3.5 gigahertz, toe four gigahertz and get a significant mawr. Ah, significant. More processing speed out of that, that, uh, CPU. But one thing is it. It may void the warranty. And if you're not cooling it properly properly your and have some serious issues. So you need to have that cooling, uh, figured out. And the best way to figure out what cooling is right for over clocking is find somebody who's using the exact same processor. There aren't that many processors out that come out in each generation, which means every year to So there aren't that many processors. Just once you decide on the processor, look at how much you can over clock it, what it costs to cool it down, and then you can go with that. So instead of spending more money on a more expensive processor, just get one that slower but can be over clocked. And ah, that's that's going to be on a case by case basis. It's like a chef. If you tell them we need to get this stuff done really fast, they're sweat's gonna be pouring cause they're moving around faster. You need to find a way to cool that guy down or that girl down so that they can They can work at that speed. So working faster, you may need to bring air conditioning in because everybody knows working on a hot, muggy day 90 100 degrees inside. You just don't want to move around quickly because everything is just a lot hotter. And you need to move slowly to stay at that temp temperature that you want. That's comfortable. So the same kind of thing in the computer not too complicated. Just a thing about those basic things am are you know, go with a m. D. We're gonna go with intel, make sure that your mother board matches up. Make sure you know what cooling system you're going to use. And if you're gonna over clock, you're going to need better cooling system. So either a better heat sink or you're gonna want to go with some sort of liquid cooling. So that's it for ah CP use. And I'll see in the next video 11. Storage and Optical: in this video we're gonna talk about, Ah, in this video, we're gonna talk about storage. So what that means is hard drives and also optical drive. So I'm gonna show you. Ah, few different things. We're gonna start off with hard drives. So, um, we're to go inside the case, and you're going to see the kind of connectors that are used, and you're gonna get to see the different types of hard drives and optical drives. So what? Start out with what's going on inside this computer? So let's zoom in. Um, I'm actually gonna take your hand held for this one. So check out that connector right there. See those other four? And then there's the 5th 1 right there. They got that L shape right there. That's a sad a connector right there. So thieves cables right here. If you pull like this blue one out, I can see what it looks like. See the l shape. And then you see the l shape of that connector. So, um, there's another kind of Satya connector right there. So and you can see there even labeled sat a three set of 31 So this one has five Sata ports integrated into the mother board. Then there's also this card. So this is Ah, this adds additional Sata ports to your computer so you can see two more. This card right here. I'll zoom out for a sec. Um, on the outside, you don't see anything. And on the inside there's those extra connectors l shaped connectors. There's two there, and then there's too on the back of the card right there. So this adds four additional ports you have that plus nose gets you nine total and you can see it fits in right here into that black PC I connector, you can see the one above. It is the exact same size, so you could add another one of these and I would add four more ports. So these sata connectors or how you connect hard drive and we'll take a look at a natural hard drive in an optical drive and show you what the connector looks like. So have that, and I'll be back in a second. - Okay , so now we're going to take a look at a few different kinds of hard drives. This is your classic car drive right here. That's what looks like on the bottom. It's a three terabyte drive and here's the connectors. So you see right there the sad of power and the sad of data connectors right there. Those pins. Right, Right there. Those air jumper pins. You almost never have to use those anymore. So this is your standard 3.5 inch hard drive, and this would just go into a caddy like that, and then this would slide into one of these slots right here. And you just screw it. Put a screw in right there. And that would attach that to the Caddy because you've got these rubber washers. It, uh it reduces the amount of vibration that gets to the hard drive because that vibration can cause issues. Um, the way the hard drive works is there's on unarmed in there and a collection of of magnetic disks, just metal discs. The best way to imagine it is like a new old record player, and it records data on using a magnet with that arm and records onto the disks that are inside this box. So this is just a box for those circular discs with the arm on top of it. There really isn't a good metaphor in terms of a kitchen for, uh, for doing something like that. This is a new type of hard drive. This is called a solid state drive, and this is 2.5 inches instead of 3.5 inches. This is the standard size for, ah, laptop hard drives. So this is a newer one. This is 500 gigabytes, and the great thing about these is they get your computer to start really quickly. But look, it's got the same exact connectors on the back of it as, ah, as the other heart as this hard drive. Those connectors are exactly the same in there. Same exact connectors Said this. That's the power connector. And then this is the data connector, and those just plug in really easy power goes right here. And, uh, data goes right here. So, uh, it's a little hard to see that with lighting that I have set up. But that's how they plug together, have 1/3 type of hard drive. This one's pretty old, but this is what you used to use. If you wanted to start up your computer so This is another 2.5 velociraptor drive. And, uh, this right here is just ah amounting combined with a heat sink that will just keep this thing cool. This is the size of hard drive used to see in older laptops. But, you see, it's got the exact same connectors on it on the back, so they're all using that Sata interface and then years, uh, you may have seen this in a previous video. This is a DVD drive. So, uh, thistles five and 1/4 inches. It's got these racks on it where it slides into the computer up top here, maybe wondering what this, uh, cases, Well, this thing's really cool. This takes five and 1/4 size and adapts it so you can put additional hard drives in there. Um, so that could be really useful if you're most the time. You don't need this space anymore. Um, and so that's where you would put this optical drive right here. So that would just slide in there. And you just slide your hard drives in and your optical drives and you're good to go. And you can see all these drives air using the exact same plugs. They've all got the same plugs, data and power. So it's really it's really pretty simple. And they've got that out of shape, so you can't plug it in the wrong way. So that's really all there is to storage. I have an older computer that has the older type of connectors. I'm gonna grab that and I'll be back in a second. So this right here is an older computer, Um, and it's got a hard drive in there, and I'm gonna show you how it's different. So first you can see it has this sticker on it with all these weird shapes, those air, different jumper configurations and the jumpers are those two white things back there. So first, I'm gonna take out this. This is the Molex connector. So if you didn't already watch the power supply video, watch that and you'll learn that this is just the older type of power connectors. So they're really annoying toe to get in and pull out because they just get stuck in there . Um, I'm really glad they got rid of thes. I'm pulling pretty hard, and it just they don't want to come out and especially when it's an older computer. Uh, can be tough to get those out. So there you can see the Molex connector right there and then you can see the different jumper positions. So there's the two jumpers right here and you can see there's one pin missing. They always do that so that you can figure out if things are are put in the right way so you can look there and see. OK, what, what jumper position was being used, but you never really have to worry about that stuff anymore. That was just back in the day. Um and then here's the data connection so that that's for power. And then this is for data. So these things are really old. This is called a T a. This isn't 80 a connector. And that's why Satya Satis Justin newer version is just S a t A. And most of the time they don't have a little handle like this to pull it out. So that's the female connector right there and see out as one slot missing one pin blocked out so you can't put it in in the wrong direction. And then there's the male side you can see there's one pin missing in the middle there. She can't put it in the wrong way. So now you can see right there all the different pin setups and, uh, and then you can figure out which which jumper configuration you have there. So this hard drives just slid in there and then this 80 a cable. I mean, it's kind of, Ah, there's you can see up here. There's also a ah, an optical drive with an 80 a connector. There's also that right there is, ah, floppy drive. So power a ta right here. I'm not gonna try to pull those out. Um, and then they connect to the to the mother board in. It's pretty hard to see where they connect. So, um, I can't really. It's It's tough to get the camera in there to show you, but it's It's right there. They connect right there. I could actually try to pull this one out. This blue taken see why they wanted to get rid of these connectors there just so annoying to use. So this pulling that one out, you hear weird sounds like cracking sounds. You never know if something's really coming out the right way. And it's just a creates a rat's nest. That's that's on the mother board. The male connector on. Then this was the other end of the cable going into it. That's the female and and see missing the missing. Ah, port right there. So you put it in in the right direction, so they're side by side. Or now I could pull this one out pretty easy to You can see there's there's two connectors , so you don't have a lot of space. These things take up a ton of space, and you just don't need to use them anymore. So, uh, you're never gonna buy a hard drive these days with one of these connectors? Um, and and so there's the cable on its own. We connect. We disconnected both ends. Um, so you can see what it looks like. That blue end goat went into the mother board and then the thieves ones probably went into an optical. Thats one went into an optical drive and this one probably went into a floppy driver. Another hard drive. Um, so, yeah, just those two different kind of connectors and ah, you're probably not going to see these anymore. But this is the old style, and you can just see how inefficient it is, how ugly it is compared to the new one. So So now let's talk a little bit more about storage. Um four computer that you're building on your own. The biggest thing you can do to get the computers start up faster. To get applications toe, move along fasters to get a solid state drive for storing anything else. Using that regular size drive is gonna be fine. So remember, this is the regular size drive this way you want to use for just storing video, storing music, whatever pictures. And then this is a solid state drive. And you can even get these fear laptop on these air Great to speed up a laptop. So those are the two major kind of drives you're gonna be looking at. And, uh, just make sure when you're deciding on size, look at how much it is cost per gigabyte. And right now, three gigabytes is the best size to get in terms of cost per gigabyte. But that's that's just going to go up and eventual before gigabytes 65 or six gigabytes. It's really all there is to it. So ah, storage isn't too complicated. You're just using the basic Sata connectors. You may want to have an optical drive, but it's also useful to have an external optical drive, cause you just very rarely have to use. Um, the only reason I use an optical drive is for the rare DVD, uh, or for ah, when A When I want install a new component and I need toe install the driver and the drivers on a CD or software. Get software off the CD. But most of the time you just don't need him anymore. So, uh, that's it for this video, See the next one? 12. Memory aka RAM: Now let's talk about memory in the kitchen. Your short term, uh, preparation work is done on a table or a counter, and that's where you store your stuff permanently. You have a pantry for that. You have a closet for that. You have cabinets for that. But that short term work area is very important. Having almost no space is is like when you're in an airplane and they have those tiny little sinks where you can just There's just a very small mount, a counter space. So it's kind of the amount of counter space that you have available to you and when you want to run a ton of different tasks, 10 different tabs open in your computer, for example, you wanna have a lot of memory, so it allows you to multitask, do a bunch of different things at the same time. Same things. Having a big desk in your office, Uh, and in terms of the human body and the human brain, your short term working memory is the equivalent of the ram inside your computer. So what that is is like when they decided for telephone numbers, were and have a seven digit telephone number. Well, they found that humans can't really easily remember more than seven digits in their short term memory. So having your are short term memories are actually very small in our culture today, people think that they can multitask, do a lot of different things without a cost. And it's a big mistake. So people texting while they're driving or emailing or even checking their GPS can be a danger because they think that they can process all that information. But really, they can't, um and there's a cost to switching, So our human brains have a very small amount of short term kind of counter space or short term working memory. So I'm gonna show you inside this computer where that short term memory is, and I'm gonna show you what it actually looks like. So because of the way there, they show up in ah, in computers you can't see. It's it's hard to really see what's going on with memory, uh, from this top view. But we're gonna take out a piece of memory right here, This one you just used these little tabs point down and then up here to appear a little bit appear He also just pushed that white tab. Come there and, uh comes out very easily. So that's what it looks like. And this is what connector looks like. So you see, as that notch in the middle, that ensures that you only put it in in the right direction. So this is DDR two can see right there, says DDR two, the more common or modern one at the time of filming. This is DDR three, and DDR four will be coming next and is already out there so you can see for this one. Ah, these are two gigabytes each. Each one of these dams is two gigabytes and you can see the two gigabyte right here. What says 2000? It says 2048 making bites. So for these in there, that means you have a cake bites. You can think about a gigabyte of, uh, Ram as one square foot of counter space. So imagine having just two gigabytes of ram. That's like having two square feet of counter space. That's almost nothing. So most computers nowadays are either four gigabytes, eight gigabytes, 16 gigabytes of memory, and you can see the number these air the not just slightly offset, so you can Onley put it into the computer in one direction. I'll show you the the female side of it right in there, Right there is hell Notch right there. And then I just put this one back in and all these, You're always going to get them in pairs. You don't buy them on their own, you buy them in pairs and you just be gentle with ease in. Figure out which direction they're supposed to go and you just pushed down and they automatically clip in and stay in there so you never have to worry about them falling out. Eso That's how Ram works. Let me grab the other computer, and I'll show you what the ram looks like in the other computer. Right? Okay. See if you can tell this by looking at it where the ram is on this computer, it looks a little bit different. It's these blue things right here. So it's a little bit I'll zoom you in. Now you can see. Um I'm gonna click this tab. Black tab right there. You see? It comes out very slightly, pushes it out and then up top There's another one of these tabs. It's pushing and outcomes the ram. So this blue metal on it is really just, uh, to make it look cool. Really? What's going on is the only thing that really matters is those this, uh, this green internal aspect of it, the circuit board. So that's that's certain. Normal circuit board is underneath here. You can see this is, ah, DDR three memory and this one's eight gigabytes each of these air eight gigabytes and there's two of them. Remember what I said? There's always a pair of thes, um, and so you can see the notch on the DDR three memory is a little bit more offset than the DDR, too, because having it off setting more makes it easier toe figure out where the notches and put it in the right direction. So let's look back here at the female side, uh, of the connector, which is right here. Uh, it's easier to see the notch, which is right up here somewhere. So could see the notches right here, right above my finger there. And, uh, so I lined up a notch and okay, just wait to hear that click sound and it's good in snug in there. So memory really is is very easy to install its It's probably the easiest thing to install eso. Upgrading your memory can really make a big difference, not that expensive. Um, I think these two together, the 16 gigs of memory cost 70 or 80 bucks, so it's really not that expensive. And it's a great investment, Um, and again to bring it back to the cooking metaphor. This is like going from a cakes to 32 gigs is I mean, it takes to 16 digs, like doubling the amount of counter space you have. So it just allows you to do a lot more, not have to worry about about stuff loading. And, ah, it's just nice to have so your computer old just zip along a lot faster. Eso That's it. That's it for RAM. Laptops have, ah, ram. That's smaller than this. So laptop Ram is going to be a different size, different dimensions. But, uh, it always goes in order of size. So one gigabyte, two gigabytes for a 16 32. Sometimes you see stuff like six gigs, Um, which is a lot of times two pairs of three, but for the most part, you just want to go to 468 248 16 32 64 and, uh, and figure out for the amount of money you're spending. What's the best ratio of how many gigabytes air getting per dollar, or how many dollars does it cost to get extra gigabytes? And where is the market? Where is that kind of sweet spot in the marketplace right now? So, uh, not too complicated, And it can. It can do a lot to make your experience with your computer better. If I was to say just one thing, um, that would probably be it. It's kind of like Kitchen. It's like, What's the one thing that would make it easier toe to create big meals? Big, exciting meals? Well, have more temporary space. So that's combination your counter space. But it's also, you know, if you've ever had a mini fridge or you have ah, half fridge half freezer, it can be you just It gets full really quickly, and you don't have enough space anymore. So it's just having that extra space, short term space to put stuff. It just it you no longer have that overcrowded feeling. You no longer feel overwhelmed by all the stuff going on. Same exact thing with your computer. So ram memory really important and one of the best easiest on first things to go for when you think about how toe get your computer toe go a little bit faster. 13. Graphics Cards aka The GPU: in this video, we're gonna talk about graphics, cards, graphics, cars is what powers your display. Some motherboards have graphics built in a small graphics built in, which usually will mean like a HD my connector or just a V G A connector, maybe just a D v I. But that's not as common. But for most computers, you're gonna wanna have your own graphics card. If your gaming, you're gonna wanna have a big graphics card, Otherwise you don't need something that intense for graphics. So what I'm gonna do is take the camera hand held again and show you, uh, what the graphics card looks like, how it works. And the graphics card is really in charge of the appearance. So in the same in a kitchen and and in culinary schools, they teach you that people eat with their eyes first, and then they eat with their stomachs. So it's really depending on what you're doing. Appearance is going to be more important or less important. So if you're doing gaming, if you're doing certain stuff with video editing or photo editing, you're gonna wanna have a better graphics card. If you you have multiple displays, it's gonna be really important have a good graphics card. But for most of just like an office computer, you're not gonna. You can either use the built in graphics or you can get a really cheap graphics card. Just Seacon do stuff like used to monitors and set a one monitor. And having to Munger's is one of the best things you can do to increase your productivity. It's just amazing the benefits that you get from using a second monitor. So I'm gonna take the camera and held him will take a look at this graphics card, so this right here is the graphics card. From the outside, you see the connectors and there's three connectors. There's V G A, which is usually blue. HTM I, which usually doesn't have a color, and Devi I, which is usually white. But they just decided to make it black here. So these are three connectors, and the way I use this is one display is powered by HTM. I. The other by D V. I. V. J. Is an older connector. It's analog instead of digital. Um, but it has all three. So that's the top of the graphics card, right? there and you can see these amounts right here. You can see four mounting screws right here, right here, right here and right here. That tells you that this is the part of of the graphics card where the processing unit is. And that's where it's going to heat up the most. Because that those mounting screws allow you to ah would allow you to potentially add cooling to it. Most graphics, cars, air gonna have ah fan already included. And those mounting screws for this particular one or actually just for the fins right here . The reason why I pointed it out is I want you to see the commonality between the mounting screw the four mounting screws right here one to 34 and, uh, the GPU. So it's all about amounting things so that you can cool down the area. That's gonna be eso for this graphics car. You wouldn't mount anything onto those four screws because those are those are amounts for this. This set of black fins right here so you can see the fins right here. This is the graphics card. This cable right here is for the V G. A. So connects to the to the circuit board right here. And then you come around and there's the V G A right here. So that's the graphics card. And it goes into this connector, this shape connector right here So you can see it has that notch right there. And that notch ensures that you only put it in in the right direction. So the great thing about this case is a Tulis case. So I could just unscrew this with my finger, and I can pull out this graphics card and show you exactly what it looks like. So there's the screw right there. Tours designed. And then I just ah, you'll see right here. There's a little locking mechanism that keeps it in for a lousy to pull it out. So first I'm gonna see if there's a mechanism like that, you can see it's right here. And then I'm just gonna gently try to pull this graphics card out ccs. Same sort of lash. So that's the This is a really this is a low end graphics card. So if you're not doing anything special, I think this was about 40 bucks. You can see the little connectors for the three different types. There's the Devi I right here. Here's the HD. Am I right here with my thumb? Here's the V G A big heat sink right there and then there's all the different stuff going on. So when you're putting it in, you look at, uh, these golden connectors and then you just line it up with where you're plugging it in. So we're plugging in right here. Someone line it up. And then once I have a lined up, I lined it up right here. Also this edge and just work it in there so slowly push down. And once it's snug in there, take the little thumb, screw and, uh, get that. I usually am not doing this with one hand, so that's a little bit. Anyways, I'll screw that in, um, so on a more expensive graphics card on a graphics card for a gaming rig. Ah, you would have a fan right here. And I actually have a, uh uh, have another graphics card that I used for another computer that had a fan here. So we just have a little fan circling around like that, and that would keep the process. The graphics card. Cool. So sometimes you have to graphics cards in a computer and they'll connect together, and I'll give you more power. So if you want faster frame rates or if you want more than one screen, um, the way it works is you have another, uh, you have another graphics card in this port, So there be one here and one here, and then you'd have a thing that linked them together, and you'll see that in a lot of gaming rigs, there's some that even will have three graphics cards. That's pretty rare, but you'll see it every once in a while. So that's it for graphics cards. That's all about driving the appearance and making things look good. And, ah, especially for gaming. That's a huge piece of it is getting that frame rate up so that the motion looks really smooth, but that's your graphics card right there in that show. 14. Case Study - Video Editing Rig - Dusty: Let's take a quick look at another computer. This is the original video editing rig that I built many years ago, and I want to give you a contrast between this and the other case that we were looking at. This one's a bit smaller. Um, the main thing I want to do is walk you through some of the components inside here and also just show you what an older computer looks like. Computer that's been through a bit. And also one that hasn't been cleaned in a while. Eso as I'm transferring things over and put together this new computer. That's part of what inspired me to create this course. And I want to show you what this computer looks like. I'm about to clean it. I'll actually show you what I used to queen it. It's It's just one of those air air canisters pressurised air. But first I wanna show you what it looks like inside the case. The focus there for you so you can see a lot of dust down here is the power girl that dust down there, Um, especially down and there. What a dust. You can see there's dust on these expansion cards here on top. Um, I'll grab the air canister. Really show you what kind of affected has. So this is the air canister right here and just noticed the difference. There's a good spot right there between before and after. So this stuff this thing is really great for getting rid of dust. And then after you do that, um, you take a damp cloth, Uh, not too wet, And then you just go through when you really queen everything off. Uh, you wanna make sure you do this outside if you can, because you get a lot of dust. Um, get inside your Airstream and cause a lot of coughing and stuff like that. Um, what's also what's do it? Quick tour of this case as well. Um, so on the inside. Really quick. You've got your ram right here. You've got some sata ports, which are for your hard drives right here and right here. Uh, you've got the CPU and heat sink. This is the heat sink. And underneath this is the CPU. Uh, and in these cards, you haven't either Net card. You have a graphics card right here, and then you have a sad a card right here to add additional hard drives. Remember, this was for a video editing rig, So having a lot of hard drives is really important. This is the main power cable that gives power to the mother board. Let's turn it around to the back, and you actually get to see the extension slots in the input output. So, down there we have your audio. Then you have either net USB. You have an e Sata port. That's for a fast connection for a hard drive. Um, keep on going up. Got another Ethernet port, which usually don't see that to either. Not ports on a mother board, more U S B. Morris, USB and then one PS two connector that you could use free one, um, than your fan. And then down here there's that networking card is the graphics card and these air to East Sata ports. So this has to e sata ports, which are for external hard drives, is gonna be much faster than a regular USB to just to show you the dust levels. Um, look it down. This is the back of the case. You can see there's thes zip, tie looking things that you can use to tie off cables. And you have this thin space right here and the cover goes on top of it. So this lousy to route cables behind this so that the front looks nicer. So just check out, for example, the amount of dust that accumulated on that wire that power cable that hadn't been used, Um, and down here in the bottom of the case, Not sure how much of the dust you can see, but pretty dusty back there. So these air where all the power cables air coming out of the power, Uh, box down here 7 50 That big number, whether it's 6 55 57 50,000 That's just how many watts power you're going to get out of that power supply. So you can see this. This case here isn't too much different from the other one we looked at. I'll quickly show you the front of it. Also, this is the front. It's got these ports. So he's got a FireWire to us. Be, uh, microphone Jack, a headphone jack on a walk so you can lock it, and then this opens up. You have a zip. Uh, not is a floppy drive right there. She barely ever have to use and then appears where you put in your five and 1/4. That's where you put in your five and 1/4 inch drives. I'm gonna grab a drive to show you what that looks like. Right? So right here. We're looking at a five and 1/4 and switches the standard size for all these optical drives . See? Right there, Uh, do your DVD drive, so that just slides right in right in here. And you can put up the four of them in there. Uh, they're not always that size, though. They don't have to be that size. This is actually an external DVD drive. So this is something that just plugs in via USB, so you can see they're not exactly the same size, same with, but they're pretty close. So these optical drives, they're not. You don't need them as much anymore. They have the same connectors as a hard drive on the back. You've got your power, the powers, the wide one. And then the data is, though thinner one right here. So, yeah, when you buy it, depending on your case, you have to put these rails on. See those two screws? That rail allows it to slide in into these slots right here, right here, right here. So that allows you to slide it in and out really easily. And then you just connected to the mother board, and you're good to go. So actually, there is one other thing I want to show you, which is right down here. See those two rubber holes right there? These air called grommets. And the reason for these two holes is if you're doing liquid cooling. So if you're doing liquid cooling, you have one going through there, one going through there and that cycles water going in cools the CPU up here, and then the warm water comes back out. Um, so that's that's really all there is to this case. It's a nice case, a big case. Um, but I wanted toe upgrade everything. So, um, we'll get more into the details of these various components in the future. Videos 15. Cooling: Now let's talk about cooling. How do you cool your computer? So the basic one that you probably already know about his fans so you can see a fan right here. Um, and this computer has a lot of different places where you can have a fan. There's two areas up here. You can have a fan here in a fan. Here else have this thing. This is a heat sink. We'll talk about that in a second. There's also a fan down here near the bottom of the computer. Right there, there's another fan. And then there's also fan slots that you can put at the front of the computer. So open up the Ah, front of the computer, and you can see that also. So there's two additional places where you can put fans and thats thing collects the dust so that you can clean those out, and it keeps the deaths from going into your room here, officer and whatever. So the most interesting thing about cooling, uh, is is cooling the CPU, but there's also some other stuff going on on the mother board. So any time you see fan fins like this, see those fins thin. See some or fins up here, There's some fins right here on the bottom of the graphics card. So you're going to see any anywhere where it's likely to get hot. You're going to see fins. This is the biggest one, though, Is is this heat sink that's on the CPU. So that's just a huge set of fins right there and that's mounted directly on top of the CPU . So what I'm gonna do in this video is show you what the actual CPU looks like without, um, without this cooler on it. And this thing is just mounted on top. So I'm gonna go right here. If you see this latch right here, that black latch right here, this black latch right here get you focused on that, Gonna pull this up and this is gonna unlatch it. And there's different sort of mounting setups, depending on whether you're using an intel or an AMG processor. So you just lift that up. It's gonna be on there pretty snug once that loosens up. Um, it's not too tough to ah, get off. It's It's in there pretty snug. So I might have to cut this video and come back in the sick. I'm actually gonna put the computer on its back. - Okay , You can see the heat sing better right there and, uh, can unlatch it. - So here's the heat sink right here. That's the latch that little square piece latches on to this black piece right here. Plastic. So that latch comes off. It's very easy to just take. So that's the heat sink right there. Cuts in copper on it. And then there's you. So it's a completely flat surface, and usually this will have, ah, a material on it, and the material will. It's called The best one in the industry is called Arctic Silver, and it it just helps heat transfer between the CPU and this surface right here. A lot better. You can see that's a completely flat surface, and it's been ground down. So it's complete, Uh, where these two medals meat. It's a completely flat surface. You put that compound on there that he transferred compound and you're good to go. So some going hope handheld for a second. So I can really show you how this things connected here. I just unlatched the heat sink and you can see that flat square right there connects to that square down there. That square down there is the CPU. That's like the little chef inside the kitchen. If you're wondering what it actually looks like, just pull it out. And, uh, it's got all these pins on it and you'll notice on here. There's some mixed missing pinholes in those match up with ease so that it goes in easily. So we'll talk more about that in the CPU video. But basically, you put a special compound on here, and it it, ah helps heat transfer better to this heat sink. Then the heat goes all up into these thin these fins thes metal fins, and then air goes through the fins and that cools the fins down. So, uh, and then so you have a fan like that in that air goes through this You may be wondering what's what's this piece right here? Well, this is the mount, So this is the mounting bracket right here. And I can tell you this is pretty annoying. Deft. Install this mounting bracket right here. But it it latches on to these two black things right here. So one end latches onto that nub coming out right there and the other latches onto this. Snub this thing right here, and that's what keeps it attached to the mother board. So this mounting right here system is for an AMG processor mounts on right like that. So amounts on that end goes onto that nub that end right there goes on to that number right there. So that's how, uh, you see, there's another set of fins. That's how Ah, here's another set of fins right there. So the way your computer's cooling itself down is by dispersing that, enter that ah, heat and then allowing air to flow through there and that cool air cools down the fins. And so that cools down. What's underneath the fin So and most computers, you're never going to see what's underneath these fins. That's why I wanted to take this off so you could really see what was going on and how this works. Uh, this is how this is how most CP use air cooled. If you want over clock it, which means run it faster, it's gonna heat up. It's like, um, we'll get more into this in the CPU section, but it's like overworking. It's like a a chef trying to move at double speed because they've got a huge set of orders coming in. So we'll talk about that in the next video on processors CPU use. 16. Mice and Keyboards: this lecture is about mice and keyboards, and people usually assume doesn't matter what might Mouse use doesn't matter what keyboard you use, and I've really found the opposite. Getting the right keyboard and the right mouse can make a huge difference and same thing with the display. It's one of the major things that helps you improve your productivity. So in the kitchen there's certain things that you're using all the time. You're using your chef's knife all the time, and so that's something that's worth investing in. If you're gonna be using that every day, 253 100 days a year, then that's something worth investing 102 $100 in, because that's a tool you're gonna be using 10 times more than almost any other tool. So same thing with your keyboard in your mouths really make sure that the things that you're going to be using the most often those are the things that you invest most heavily in. And a lot of people just don't think about their equipment that way. So really think about how much time you're investing and really using it. And that's where Mount mice and keyboard come into play because you can get a my mouse and keyboard. You can switch computers and still use the same mouth, same keyboard. I've got the same wireless keyboard that I've been using for probably six or seven years by now, and it's just a really, really great keyboard. And ah, and I don't want to switch. I don't want to use a new one now. What I will tell you is, uh, there's really two things I recommend for mice. Any desktop mouse, you're going to get a probably a wired mouse, and what I recommend is you get something that's calling toward for your hand. I've been using logic tech for almost everything that I buy in terms of keyboard of mice and Webcams. Um, so I would go with, and I'll include a link after this video with the specific my mice and keyboard that I use . Um, the keyboard is just a flat wireless keyboard, and the old mouse I used was a, uh, wireless mouse that had a bunch of a few extra buttons on it, and it had a quick wheel that you could click it down and it would spin freely, and you could click it again and would have that click click, click motion to it. And so I used that for several years and was happy with it. And then I was looking for a Nedum was looking for. How could I become more productive with my mouth? Because I feel like there's all these fingers here and in video games. You're using your fingers a lot more than in your hand a lot more than what you're doing with a mouse. So I started. Think well, is there something here? And I looked up gaming mice, and I found that there's mice that are usually used by people who play massively multiplayer online games, something I've never really been into. But they have mice that have on the where the thumb goes as a bunch of extra buttons. And so I did a ton of research on on gaming mice, and the thing about gaming is it's all about speed. And so, uh, all the gaming mice out there basically the ones have the most buttons, especially is they're all wired. And so for a long time, I thought, I've been using wireless for so long I ever be able to go back, and I can tell you it's been really easy to go back toe wired. I haven't had any issues with it. Um, understand, if you have a laptop, yeah, it could be a bit more of an issue, but as long as he's got a long cord, you're not gonna have any problems. And I really like this mouse. It's got 12 buttons just right here, a 12 4 by three grid of buttons, and it's got a few extra buttons on the other parts that has got three push down buttons up top eso like your left Quick, your middle quick and you're right click and it's it's super powerful, so I high recommend you check out the one that I used Include that in the link, Um, and I'll give you an example. So, uh, in Premier Premiere Pro, which is video editing software, I have, ah, a bunch of buttons set up so I can go forward of frame, Back of frame slow mo play Pause. Cut the video switch between various video editing tools and they make keyboards. Special keyboards have colors on them and stuff, so you know where all the shortcuts are, but I like having it on the mouse, Um, and so, like, I have another mode on the on the mouse where it's got shortcuts for cut copy, paste print, dim my screen or brightened my screen print screen escape. Just the functions that you use most often use program them in, and it's very makes, especially Web browsing easier. You don't have to use your left hand to find keyboard shortcut accidentally pressed the wrong one, and I really love it. So I highly recommend you do that. For some reason, nobody in the productivity areas really, really bumped into this thing, but the gaming. It's just another example of of what I talk about my creativity course about how creativity is really just taking something from one domain and bring it into a domain where it's not used yet. So gaming is one domain where they've really optimized the human computer interface because it's about performance and its competition, and it's anything that's highly competitive. There's going to be constant innovation, but with stuff like office skills, where there's no competition or very little, there's no incentive for people to improve their human computer interface. So except for specialized domains, like video editors of three D modeling. Where they do have these specialized setups, most people are just using the same old mouse and keyboard that's been around for decades, So I have a recommend you check out this stuff out included as US and text links in the lecture after this one. 17. Displays: one other thing I want to touch on real briefly is displays, and I highly recommend you go out and get to displays your desktop system. Where if it's a laptop, get at least an extra display when you're choosing a laptop, look for laptops that have high resolution. This is one of the biggest things that people don't realize is. You get so much more done if you have high resolution. And the great thing about it is, if you have a 10 80 p or larger widescreen laptop, it allows you to put two windows side by side and have him basically full with and be able to do things side by side. So you have a spreadsheet on one side of document. On the other side, you have two different components that you're comparing, that you want to buy email on one side, work stuff on the other side, just how we recommend doing that. And then for when you set up your desk, whether it's a desktop tower or a laptop, I high recommend you get to 24 inch displays having side by side. It's just huge for productivity. You get a lot more done It's been shown through studies to be the number one thing you can do to improve your productivity. You just get another display. So I high recommend to get another display. You don't need any sort of fancy. You can go to get the cheapest graphics card on the market for, like, 2030 40 bucks, and it's going to support to display. So all you need to do is really make sure that the displays you're using have the right connectors. And if you're gonna be doing graphics work, um, like video stuff, photo shop stuff, make sure you invest money in a display that is color accurate. Ah, lot of a lot of displays don't have great color accuracy. Eso When I got into video editing and I was building that video editing computer, I spent ah lot more money than I otherwise would probably around $300 to get a really nice display that hadn't really good color accuracy, but my second display. I didn't need that. So, um, the others play God. I just got it used off Craigslist for Probably run 100 bucks so you don't have to spend a lot of money you just have to know what what you're using it for and what's the bare minimum you need for that? And then what are the best places to buy the components, whether new were used based on what you need for what you're doing?