Start Up – Equipment

To begin, you will need the proper equipment. There are three essential pieces of equipment required:

1. A computer, including peripherals such as a monitor, printing, scanner, etc.
2. A modem to connect your computer to a telephone line and/or an Ethernet connection
3. An Internet connection through a telephone jack, such as a digital subscriber line e.g. DSL, cable line, or satellite
Computers

To access the web, and to run all the necessary applications you will require to run a website, a computer should have at the minimum:

Hard drive: 80 Gigabytes (GB)
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Processor Speed: 1.8 Gigahertz (GHz)
Drives: DVD 16X
Modem: 56K
Monitor: 15 inch CRT (flat panel LCD best)
Networking: Ethernet LAN port on the system board

CRT stands for cathode ray tube describing the technology inside a traditional computer monitor or television set. A CRT monitor or TV is readily recognizable by its bulky form. LCD monitors and plasma television sets, that are referred to as flat panel displays, use different technologies than a CRT; allowing a much slimmer product profile.

When you purchase a computer, you are likely to receive a keyboard, mouse, and monitor as part of the package. Most desktop computer systems sold now by default come with LCD monitors. Because an LCD uses a matrix of cells to display its image, it has a fixed (or native) resolution at which it looks best.

A 15-inch LCD has a native resolution of 1024 x 768, while a 17- or 18-inch model will look its best at 1280 x 1024 or 1440 x 900 depending on the screen’s format. If you set the monitor to a lower resolution the image will blur because the display will use only a portion of the pixels it contains and will scale up the resulting image to fill the screen. For most users, a 15-inch LCD monitor makes a good choice.

Three important things that will affect a computer’s ability to help you move around effectively online are:

1. Processor Speed/Clock Speed
2. Quantity of RAM
3. Size of Hard Drive

Note: Some CRTs come with a flat screen, but this is not to be confused with a flat panel display.

PROCESSOR SPEED/CLOCK SPEED
In advertisements, you’ll read about Pentium machines running at 2.5 gigahertz – but what does that mean?
Processors perform instructions under a time frame, or cycle. These cycles are measured in megahertz, or millions of cycles per second. This is known as clock speed. As processors become increasingly efficient, the time it takes to complete a cycle becomes shorter, and computers work faster and faster.

The megahertz is commonly used to express microprocessor clock speed. The megahertz, abbreviated MHz, is a unit of alternating current (AC) or electromagnetic (EM) wave frequency equal to one million hertz (1,000,000 Hz). Typical computer clock speeds, once on the order of a few hundred megahertz, are now often in the low gigahertz range. Often abbreviated GHz. 1 gigahertz = 1000 megahertz = a billion cycles per second.

What you really need to understand is that the bigger the number the faster the computer; a 2 GHz CPU, all else being equal, will calculate twice as fast as a 1 GHz CPU.

As processors become increasingly efficient they are able to process an increasing number of instructions and our computers – in conjunction with software – are seen as being capable of doing more and more sophisticated work faster.

QUANTITY OF RAM
RAM (Random Access Memory) is the amount of “processing space” your computer has to accomplish a computational task.

Measured in megabytes (or MBs), the more RAM you have, the better; RAM will affect the speed at which your different software can run, in addition to allowing you the option of running several software programs simultaneously. Also note that newer versions of system software and web browsers require more and more RAM.

SIZE OF HARD DRIVE
A hard drive is a mass storage device found in all PCs (with few exceptions) that is used to store permanent data such as the operating system, programs and user files.
Hard drives come with many different storage capacities. Hard drive capacity is measured in bytes with common capacities being stated in MB (Megabytes) and GB (Gigabytes).

In the old days it was common to find hard drives with a capacity of just 5MB; nowadays it is hard to buy a new hard drive with less than 40GB, that’s 40,960 Megabytes. Common hard drive capacities these days range from 40GB up to and exceeding 120GB.

As a real world example, let’s take a color photo that takes up 500 KB of storage space on a hard drive. If you had a 40GB hard drive, you could potentially store up to 81,290 color photos. Although this is obviously hypothetical since your hard drive also stores your operating system and programs.

Note: Don’t confuse the size of your hard drive with the amount of RAM in your machine. While both are measured in megabytes, your hard drive is primarily storage space; RAM is processing space.

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