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ensure compatibility.
A
buffer
is a portion of RAM which is used to temporarily store data, usually
from an application, though it is also used when printing, and in most key-
board drivers. The CPU can manipulate data in a buffer before copying it, all at
once, to a disk drive. While this improves system performance--reading to or
writing from a disk drive a single time is much faster than doing so repeatedly--
there is the possibility of losing your data should the system crash. Informa-
tion stored in a buffer is temporarily stored, not permanently saved.
A
bus
is a data pathway. The term is used especially to refer to the connec-
tion between the processor and system memory, and between the processor
and PCI or ISA local buses.
Bus mastering
allows peripheral devices and IDEs to access the system
memory without going through the CPU (similar to DMA channels).
A
cache
is a temporary storage area for data that will be needed often by an
application. Using a cache lowers data access times, since the needed
information is stored in the SRAM instead of in the slower DRAM. Note that
the cache is also much smaller than your regular memory: a typical cache
size is 512KB, while you may have as much as 1GB of regular memory.
Cache size
refers to the physical size of the cache onboard. This should not
be confused with the cacheable area, which is the total amount of memory
which can be scanned by the system in search of data to put into the cache. A
typical setup would be a cache size of 512KB, and a cacheable area of
512MB. In this case, up to 512MB of the main memory onboard is capable of
being cached. However, only 512KB of this memory will be in the cache at
any given moment. Any main memory above 512MB could never be cached.
Closed and open jumpers
Jumpers and jumper pins are active when
they are On or Closed, and inactive when they are Off or Open.
CMOS
Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductors are chips that hold
the basic start-up information for the BIOS.
The
COM port
is another name for the serial port, which is so-called
SYSTEM
