Winbook XP5 Pro, Руководство пользователя

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XP5 Pro Chapter Two Pag e 1 of 11
Chapter Two: Basic Computing
The WinBook XP5 Pro is designed to be run straight out of the box, so, if you are an experienced
computer user, then you should be ready to go. You can find additional information about specific
features of your system in the chapters that follow. If you are not an experienced user, you should take
a moment to read this chapter and familiarize yourself with some basic aspects of computing under the
Windows 95 operating system.
RAM
RAM (Random Access Memory), also sometimes referred to as system memory, is the active memory
of your computer, where it holds programs and data that are currently in use. The more RAM your
computer has, the more space it has to run programs. Your WinBook XP5 Pro came with a certain
amount of RAM (probably 8MB or 16MB), but that is not the limits of the memory used by Windows
95. Windows 95 will set up a swap file on your hard drive to provide additional "virtual memory."
When the programs you are running need more than the memory available in RAM on your computer,
Windows 95 will "swap" some programs from RAM to that hard drive. When those bits of memory
are needed, Windows 95 will swap them back into RAM (and, if necessary, swap other bits of memory
to the hard drive). Even with a fast data bus and fast hard drive, the reading and writing to the disk is
slower than having the data available in RAM. If you find that your computer is doing a lot of
swapping and is slowing the response time of your computer, you should consider upgrading the
memory in your computer (see Chapter Five).
Some programs will require a lot of RAM to run. As a result, the number of programs that you can
run simultaneously will vary with the type of applications in use.
When you place your WinBook XP5 Pro in the Suspend mode, it will use a small amount of battery
power to keep the RAM active while shutting down the other elements of your system. When you
resume using the system, your active sessions in RAM will be available just as you left them. [XP5 Pro
2.2]
Hard Drives
The hard drive is the fixed disk which provides the primary storage medium for your data. Most of
your programs and data will be stored on the hard drive. The capacity of your hard drive will probably
be several hundred megabytes (1 megabyte (MB) = 1,048,576 bytes) or a little over one gigabyte (1
gigabyte (GB) = 1,073,741,824bytes or 1024MB). The programs you run and the data you create will
be stored on this hard drive and take up some of that available space. Programs tend to take up a lot
of disk space (some may take up 50-60 megabytes), while the files that you create will generally take
up much less (stored in plain text, a 1,000 page manuscript will fit in less than 1 megabyte).
[Sidebar: If your computer is connected to a network, you will also have access to hard drives on