System Unit

Expansion Card
An expansion card is an electronic board or card added in a desktop computer or other non-portable computer to give that computer a new ability, such as the ability to connect to another computer using a network cable.

Network Interface Card

A network interface card (NIC) is a computer circuit board or card that is installed in a computer so that it can be connected to a network. Personal computers and workstations on a local area network (LAN) typically contain a network interface card specifically designed for the LAN transmission technology, such as Ethernet or Token Ring. Network interface cards provide a dedicated, full-time connection to a network.

Cache Memory
Cache memory is random access memory (RAM) that a computer microprocessor can access more quickly than it can access regular RAM. As the microprocessor processes data, it looks first in the cache memory and if it finds the data there (from a previous reading of data), it does not have to do the more time-consuming reading of data from larger memory.

Plug & Play
Plug and play is a term used to describe the characteristic of a computer bus, or device specification, which facilitates the discovery of a hardware component in a system, without the need for physical device configuration, or user intervention in resolving resource conflicts.

Sockets
A socket is an endpoint for communication between two machines.
The actual work of the socket is performed by an instance of the SocketImpl class. An application, by changing the socket factory that creates the socket implementation, can configure itself to create sockets appropriate to the local firewall.

Chips (Computer-chips)
A small piece of semiconducting material (usually silicon) on which an integrated circuit is embedded. A typical chip is less than ¼-square inches and can contain millions of electronic components (transistors). Computers consist of many chips placed on electronic boards called printed circuit boards.
Example of chips: CPU chips(microprocessors) contain an entire processing unit, whereas memory chips contain blank memory.

Slots
Slots comprises the operation issue and data paths machinery surrounding a collection of one or more functional units (FUs) which share these resources. The term slot is common for this purpose in the VLIW world where the relationship between operation in an instruction and pipeline to execute it is explicit. In dynamically scheduled machines the concept is more commonly called an execute pipeline.

Bus lines
The bus lines are the communicating electronic lines that connect different parts of the CPU to various other parts. In addition, the bus lines also link the CPU to different parts on the system board of your computer. The data flows in the form of bits along the bus lines. The bus lines are like multilane pathway which means that the more bus lines are on the system the greater is the rate of transfer of data along the bus, which means that the computer can run efficiently and will perform the operations at a faster rate.

Serial Port

Serial port is a serial communication physical interface through which information transfers in or out one bit at a time (contrast parallel port).[1] Throughout most of the history of personal computers, data transfer through serial ports connected the computer to devices such as terminals and various peripherals.

Parallel Port

A parallel port is a type of interface found on computers (personal and otherwise) for connecting various peripherals. It is also known as a printer port or Centronics port. The IEEE 1284 standard defines the bi-directional version of the port.


Universal Serial Bus
USB (Universal Serial Bus) is a way of setting up communication between a computer and peripheral devices. USB is intended to replace many varieties of serial and parallel ports. USB can connect computer peripherals.For many of those devices, USB has become the standard connection method. USB was designed for personal computers, but it has become commonplace on other devices such as PDAs and video game consoles, and as a power cord between a device and an AC adapter plugged into a wall plug for charging.

Firewire Port
FireWire is Apple Computer's version of a standard, IEEE 1394, High Performance Serial Bus, for connecting devices to your personal computer. FireWire provides a single plug-and-socket connection on which up to 63 devices can be attached with data transfer speeds up to 400 Mbps (megabits per second). The standard describes a serial bus or pathway between one or more peripheral devices and your computer's microprocessor.