Computers

A reference to find info about various pieces of hardware that I have used or am using, work with, or want to use, or have fixed, or ... Some links here may be out of date, vendors keep on changing their pages.

Table of Contents

• Apple Components
• ASUS Components
• Dell Components
• Sun Components
• Memory
• Disk Storage
• Optical Drives & Media
• Sony Components
• Tape Storage
• Floppy & Removable Media Storage
• Mass Storage Controllers & Busses
• Printing & Imaging
• Network Hardware
• Video Adapters & Hardware
• Audio Hardware
• Console & TTY Devices
• UPS -- Uninterruptible Power Supply

Rough categories:

• Computers
• Motherboards
• Video Cards
• Disks
• Tapes
• Printers
• Scanners
• Cases
• Power Supplies
• CPUs
• Memory
• Ethernet Cards
• Network Hubs/Switches
• Modems
• Wireless Gear
• Keyboards & Mice.
• Joysticks and paraphenalias.
• Test suites.
• Suns
• PCs
• ???

Spares

• Old power supply from A7V (the one with the antec)
• Lite-ON CD RW ATA (to replace broken DVD103)
• Adaptec 2940 SCSI
• Adaptec 2940UW SCSI
• ASUS SC200 NCR/SYMBIOS SCSI

FireWire

• 160GB Disk
• CD/RW

USB

• USB 1.44 MB Floppy
• USB ZIP 250

Boot Info

• MBR
• Partitions
• Extended Partitions
• Physical Partitions
• Logical Partitions
• Disk Geometries
• Real
• Mapped
• Larg Disk
• SCSI
• ATAPI
• The first track of a modern disk (the first 63 sectors with the fake 1024/16/63 mappings) is called the Boot Track.
• Ghost parts its DOS signature in sector 62 (last sector) of the boot track.

USB -- Universal Serial Bus

• USB 1.0
• USB 1.1
• USB 2.0

IEEE 1284 -- Parallel Printer Port

• XXX break inso standard versus pc specific items, probably same for all the other specific hardware instances.
• Speeds
• PP, ECP, EPP port types, interrupt, dma
• Cables.

IEEE 1384 -- FireWire

• 400 MB/sec
• 800 MB/sec (FW800)
• Chained device setup like SCSI

PCI

• PCI [-X] -SPD
• 32 / 64 Bit X == extended 64 bit
• 100 / 133 MHz Speed
• ??? 33 / 66 / 133 BUs Speeds?
• 4 or 8 bytes (32 or 64 bits) per bus clock.
• @ 133 64bit 133 x8 == 1064 MB/sec
• @ 66 32bit 66 x4 == 264 MB/sec
• @ 33 32bit 33 x4 == 133 MB/sec

PCI Express

• PCI-E
• Lanes of I/O capability
• Initially graphics cards, but now many hi bandwidth cards are available in PCI-E.

Plextor SCSI CD/RW

Yamaha SCSI CD/RW

Antec Power Supply

ThermalTake Armor Case

CPU Coolers

WindTunnel Case

Athlon CPUs

• AMD
• AMD Processor Utilities & Updates
• AMD CPUID
• AMD OPN (Ordering Part Number) Guide

Intel CPUs

• Intel CPU Identification Tools
• Processor Spec Finder

System Bus

• ISA
• EISA
• MCA
• AGP
• PCI 32 Bit 3.3 Volt
• PCI-X PCI-Extended 64 Bit 133 MHZ
• PCI-E PCI Express

External Bus

• RS-232
• RS-422
• PC Keyboard
• PS/2
• FW-400
• FW-800
• USB
• USB 2.0

BIOS Manufacturers

• AMI -- American Megatrends
• Award Technologies
• Microid Research Inc
• Phoenix Technologies

References -- PC, SUN, SCSI, IDE, etc.

• Tom's Hardware Page
• Andandtech
• OverClocker Cafe