One of the best favors a computer user can do is adopt an old computer. Not only are you doing something good for the environment - our landfills are filling up with ‘ewaste’ faster than it can biodegrade! - but you can teach yourself a few tricks which can save you money down the line. And just watch your friends reaction when you tell them you fixed your own box! Pick one up at a used-goods store or yard sale, or simply take one off of a friend’s hands the next time somebody’s throwing one out. And now what? Open ‘er up and have a look - this is much easier than you think:

This is a highly simplified diagram - there might be other parts such as box fans involved, or the processor might be shaped differently, but generally 90% of your desktop PCs currently look about like this:

A: The motherboard. The big, flat part in the back that everything plugs into. Think of a spine in the human body - same basic function. The most common form of motherboard is the ATX. Talks to all the devices which hold data (gray cords).

B: The processor. Where all the operations and calculations are done. Think of your inner brain, the part that does the heavy lifting. It has at least a fan and usually a finned contraption called a heat-sink. Just like your car engine, a processor must be kept cool or it’s deadsville.

C: Power box. The cord from the wall goes in here, and the power box splits your household current up into 5 and 12 volt increments to feed the various devices that need power (black cords).

D: The hard drive. You hear it buzzing quietly when you open a program or download a file. Think of the ‘memory’ part of your brain - every piece of data your computer stores goes here.

E: The CD-ROM/DVD drive. A place to put those shiny plastic disks, loading new software, music, or movies. Still sticking around for awhile, unlike…

F: The floppy drive. Soon going the way of the dinosaur. Floppy disks can only hold 1.44 Megabytes, which is silly in today’s age of 1 Gigabyte programs. But if you’re rescuing an old computer, expect to encounter them for a while yet. Being replaced by USB thumb drives.

G: Memory sticks. These slots are where you stick RAM memory modules, which change their flavor from year to year but are called things like DRAM, DDRAM, MAMM, and probably SAMM if they get to it. This is a different kind of memory, because it is empty every time the computer starts. Think of a scratch pad where you might make a grocery list or jot down a phone message - RAM allows the processor to pull up whole files and work with them all at once, instead of having to access the hard drive for each little byte - which would be too slow!

H: Ports. Everything from your mouse and keyboard to accessories like printers go here. Rapidly becoming a bank of USB ports, as USB (Universal Serial Bus) is becoming the universal data connection.

I: Expansion card slots. Ethernet modems, video cards, sound cards, and other add-on devices go here. While most computers have some video and sound capabilities built in, at the rate technology advances the built-in part is obsolete by the time it ships. A special video card is almost mandatory these days even if you aren’t a heavy gamer. Your monitor plug into a connector at the back of one of these cards.

That’s it! the great thing about getting a cheap, second computer is that you have less to worry about. You can swap parts around and see what works and what doesn’t. You can use it as a practice machine, give it to the kids, or even get some use out of it as a back-up machine or server.

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