| Forum Home | ||||
| Press F1 | ||||
| Thread ID: 30100 | 2003-02-10 09:16:00 | Defining data capacity to PC newbies... | Ichthus (165) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 120019 | 2003-02-10 09:16:00 | Recently have "helped" out a few friends getting started with computers. :D One concept I find difficult to get across (my own limitation I guess) is that of data capacity of discs, HDD's, RAM etc. :8} I often try to use photo's as an example, but if you dont have even a small grasp on resolutions and therefore potential file size, I begin to struggle to get the message across. Even showing someone a floppy and saying that you can get 70 on one cd, or 6 (thereabouts?) CD's on a DVD, doesnt really work if you dont have any concept of what 'fits' on a floopy or CD in the first place. Any suggestions for a good 'real world' (read non-PC jargon) examples to use. |
Ichthus (165) | ||
| 120020 | 2003-02-10 10:08:00 | Morse code. Morse code uses a 3 digit code - . _ and a space between letters. Computers use a 2 digit code - 0 and 1 As computers don't use the space every letter, space or bit of punctuation is made up of 8 digits so it knows where each character starts and ends. These digits are called "bits". 8 bits make 1 "byte" Now if you create a document in say Word then it is made up of x number of characters (bytes) plus a whole lot extra inserted by the program so that it knows what to do with it (open it in Word, make things bold, use a certain font etc etc) |
Heather P (163) | ||
| 120021 | 2003-02-10 10:18:00 | I always have trouble explaining this too. It's not that you don't understand it, it's just that you can't explain it in simple terms. I've tried explaining the difference between Memory and Hard Drive space but it never gets through to them that I repeat myself over and over. Unless they are really willing to learn this they are going to need to hit books on computers, I'm sure PC World had magazines that explained it simple enough that now monkeys know how to fly spaceshuttles. |
Kame (312) | ||
| 120022 | 2003-02-10 10:25:00 | >Memory and Hard Drive Memory = brain Hard drive = book Brain is temporary. Turn the brain off and storage is lost. If it's stored on the hard drive it's like being written down in a book. Still there later. |
Heather P (163) | ||
| 120023 | 2003-02-10 10:45:00 | Maybe this will help: Using the Bible as a common reference: The King James version has 3,116,480 characters, so you could fit the uncompressed text of 218 Bibles on one 650Mb CD or 6729 Bibles on a 20Gb hard drive :) Maths isn't my forte, so my calculations might be off ;) |
Rod J (451) | ||
| 120024 | 2003-02-10 22:12:00 | You can fit a divx movie good picture quality onto a 700 meg cdr or 10 movies on a 8 gig HDD , songs are smaller 3 to 4 megs in size so you can fit more than 200 mp3s onto a cdr . | kiwibeat (304) | ||
| 120025 | 2003-02-11 05:28:00 | Cheers RodJ, just the sort of reference I was after. Thanks everyone for the in-put B-) |
Ichthus (165) | ||
| 120026 | 2003-02-11 07:03:00 | Sorry Heather but your explanation may seem good but it's not quite correct. Memory is not the same as the Brain. The Brain does more than store information. It can manipulate data. Memory can't do that without the aid of the CPU. Also Hard Drive like book can be correct if explained thoroughly... unless you put in you can use twink for moving, copying, deleting, etc (because deleting replaces the data with a code that tells the OS it can write over the space, the white left by the twink represents the code, scratchin the twink off = data recovery :P). Explaining Formatting. Well that's different that means using an Eraser. |
Kame (312) | ||
| 120027 | 2003-02-11 07:18:00 | > it's just that you can't explain it in simple terms. and >it's not quite correct The trouble with being "quite correct" is that the explanations become overly complex. Most people that are new to computers have around 3,000 things to learn all at once (Info overload, brain shutsdown and eyes roll). Understanding the basic principle - flick the power switch off and you lose anything in memory but stuff stored on the disk is still there as if you had written it in a book - is usually enough for a short (or long, depending on person) time. But if you want to get technical... |
Heather P (163) | ||
| 120028 | 2003-02-11 20:30:00 | Q. How much does hda hold? A. A LOT! Like - The KJV a thousand times over... Q. How much does hdb hold? A. Twice as much as hda! Q. How much does a CD hold? A. Not very much in comparison to hda or hdb! :D ;-) |
Chilling_Silence (9) | ||
| 1 2 | |||||