Chapter 6

  • what is Moore's Law?
  • Evaluate CPU
    • what is CPU and where it is located
    • CPU is composed of two units: Control and ALU -- what do they do?
    • CPU speed: Hertz -- machine cycles per second
  • Evaluate RAM
    • why not use a hard drive to store the data and instructions?
    • where is it located?
    • 3 types of modules: SIMM, DIMM, RIMM (you do not need to understand what they are).
    • Virtual memory: where is it located?
    • what is memory bound? -- thrashing
  • Evaluate the storage subsystem
    • Hard drive:
      • how fast is it to retrieve data?
      • how is it composed? platter, head, arms, sector, track
      • IDE and SCSI -- you just need to know the terms!
    • magnetic media vs. optical media
    • For CDRW: 32x12x48 -- what does it mean?
    • what is a video card? where is it located?
    • monitor size: LCD vs. CRT
    • what does the sound card do? where is it located?
    • some common ports:
      • serial -- mice
      • parallel -- printer
      • USB
      • Firewire -- 1394
      • Ethernet -- network
  • Examples

Chapter 7

  • Network architecture
    • peer-to-peer (P2P): 4 types
    • client/server
  • Transmission media: twisted pair cable, coaxial cable or fiber-optical cable
  • LAN vs. WAN (geographic distance -- 1 mile)
  • network adapter -- NIC
  • network navigation devices: router vs. hub -- between networks vs inside same network
  • Types of P2P networks: what kinds of media they use? what is 802.11 standard and WiFi?
    • power line
    • phone line
    • ethernet
    • wireless
  • Hackers: what are they?
  • Denial of Service (DOS)
  • How hackers gain access? -- logical ports
  • Firewall: how it works? packet filtering and logical port blocking
  • Virus:
    • what is it?
    • types: boot sector viruses, logic bombs, worms, macro virus,trojan horses.
    • virus vs. worms.
  • Examples

Chapter 8

  • Mobile devices:
    • pager: cheapest
    • cell phone: how it works?
    • mp3 player: mp3 sampling
    • PDA: stylus for input, does it have hard drive? what is BlueBoard?
    • Tablet PC: main feature: handwriting recognition
    • laptop: vs desktop -- power management
  • do they use OS? How about storage: ROM, RAM and flash card or hard drive
  • Examples

Chapter 9

  • Switches and bits
    • vacuum tubes: space and heat
    • transistor: single
    • integrated circuits: multiple in a single board -- chips -> microprocesor
  • Binary system:  67  base 10 <-> 1000011 base 2
  • ASCII vs Unicode -- 8 bits vs 16 bits
  • System clock: Hz
  • CPU machine cycle:
    • fetch à from Memory to register; L1/L2 cache memory
    • decode à control unit
    • execute à ALU
    • store: back to register
  • DRAM vs SRAM
  • what is system bus? memory <-> CPU
  • pipelining:  processing multiple instructions simultaneously, each at a different stage of the machine cycle.
  • Examples

Chapter 10

  • System development life cycle (SDLC):
    • Problem/Opportunity Identification : make decisions
    • Analysis - study and define the requirement to recommend a solution
    • design: detailed plan: flowcharts and data-flow diagrams
    • Development and documentation: coding -- first step of PDLS (program development life cycle).
    • testing and installation
    • maintenance and evaluation: upgrade and bug fix
  • What is algorithm?
  • classes -- categories of objects in OOP.
  • Machine languages:
    • 1GL - machine language: bits
    • 2GL -- assembly: words
    • 3GL -- C/C++: symbols
    • 4GL -- SQL: powerful commands
    • 5GL -- Visual Basic: graphic interfaces
  • Compilers transfer the source code to executable machine language
  • Debugging to find the logic errors.
  • Examples