I love this topic and I could probably go on and on about it, but I shall not. I love computers. I want to be, and am, a computer administrator, so this is a good thing. This week's content has been geared to exactly what I know and some things that have been clarified for me.
I have built several computers over the course of my career and school time. Everything that Professor Olson talked about were things that I've known or had a general idea about. My current computer system is a few years old, but I have about a two or three year old motherboard in it (due to my budget), but it's brand new in the fact that it was just placed into my system (by myself) about five months ago.
Building computers has mostly been a hobby, though. I had to teach myself with a pre-built computer and add components as they either died or became obsolete. I've given my system plenty of blood, sweat, and tears over the years (literally in all three cases, ha!).
I don't know enough about the specs for most hardware, though, so I'm almost always behind the times with my hardware, but that's fine. My computer simply needs to be able to run the internet, a few games, a couple messenger services, and Office. The games are the things that cause most of the headache to get the required specs. I never want just the "minimum" so I have to figure out what is good, but not the best. I do research on the web and they throw numbers and acronyms that usually mean nothing to me. This lesson has helped answer some of these questions for me. (RAM was a large proponent that I had to learn off the cuff. Sadly, this was detrimental to my pocket at the time.)
I have no pictures at this time for this subject. Mostly because they're all deemed classified or show equipment that the military would frown upon me showing onto a non-secure site. Oh well! I had a picture of me in a tunnel in Iraq running cable, but 1) I have lost that picture and 2) it's more in line with next week's topic of Networking than it is Hardware in the computer.
