Hardware is one of the most important components of your personal computer. Without it, your computer will not work. All the other components depend on this. You need to choose your computer with utmost care because you are not only buying the software that will run on it, but also the hardware that will be installed on it. Hardware is something that does not come along with the computer and has to be purchased separately. It consists of the hardware devices such as the hard disk, optical drive, mouse, printer, motherboard, hard disk drives and memory cards.

These are the most vital components of any personal computers. They help in the transfer of data and maintain the computers’ speed. Hard disk drives come in various sizes. They can either be compact disks or large hard disks. Some of them have more capacity than others.

The optical drive stores digital pictures. The optical drive uses a CD-ROM drive to store data. It is designed in such a way so that it can read all the formats that are commonly used by users. Mouse enables the user to manipulate the desktop. The keyboard is an input device that allows the user to input text and data into the computer system.

The computer system requires an operating system such as Linux, Solaris, Windows or others. These operating systems run on a single core of CPU. A microprocessor on the other hand is a special type of chip used to operate the computer. They are usually manufactured by Sun Microsystems and Intel. Memory is another component that helps in executing programs and running applications.

The control unit or the BIOS is the part of the computer system that transfers execution control from the microprocessor to different applications. The control unit in most of the computers are enhanced with hardware such as keyboard, optical mouse, audio interface, video input and output interface, etc. The computer systems have built-in control units but sometimes they may need to be loaded with additional modules. The operating system loads the necessary modules with relative ease after checking if they are compatible with the operating system.

LCD screen is a visual display screen that is capable of displaying colors, lines, logos, text or images. LCD monitors are used for many purposes such as viewing text, images or movies. VGA output devices are video output devices that are capable of transmitting the image to another source. The video output devices include LCD monitors and plasma TV. South African personal computers are also equipped with USB ports, which are useful to upload and download applications and data.