Researchers at HP Labs were able to build a real working “memristor”; adding to the three basic circuit elements. This discovery opens up lots of possibilities for electronic circuits.

So, what is a memristor? A memristor, or memory resistor, carries a memory of its past. Even when the voltage to a circuit is turned off, the memristor will remember how much voltage was applied and for how long. This characteristic cannot be replicated by any combination of the three circuit elements.

The memory or RAM inside your computer is volatile memory. This means that when you turn off your computer, all of the temporary data stored in the memory is lost. Memristors open up the possibility to create non-volatile memory that remembers the state your computer was in when you turned it off. Your computer will return to the exact state it was when you turned it off, no more waiting for your computer to boot up and initialize.

There are many other applications for memristors such as building computers to replicate the human brain. Keep an eye out for more discoveries in the realm of memristors.

After reading my last post,  hopefully you have realized that knowing how a computer works can save you time and money the next time you’re in the market for one. In the interest of time and money, I thought I would dig a little deeper into this subject of buying a new computer.

Let’s start with the basics:

What do you want your computer to do well? This is the familiar question rattling out of any Best Buy moron with half a brain trying to make his way through college. In order to better understand this question you need a crash course in what does what for your computing - ahem – “pleasures”.

CPU/Processor/Brains: Call it what you will, but this really isn’t all that difficult to remember what it does. The more powerful the CPU, the more types of applications you can run. Think of this as you brains IQ. If you have a high IQ you can handle much more serious and complex types of problems. While with a low IQ and your stuck with putting the square peg in the circular whole. With a CPU its very similar. Fast CPU and you can do things like photo editing, and rendering HD Videos. Slow CPU and all you’re running is Microsoft Word. What is fast? Depends… its a product of the amount of ghz, cores, etc.

RAM: Yes it stands for something. No you don’t need to know what it means. What you do need to know is what it helps with. RAM is your computers ability to run multiple applications simultaneously without exploding. RAM assists the CPU in storing whatever information is needed per application temporarily as the computer is running. The communication between the RAM and CPU mainly replicates how your short term memory works in accordance to your IQ (CPU). All you need to know, is that the more RAM you have the more applications you can run simultaneously for the most part. RAM is especially useful when doing photo-editing and you have multiple high resolutions images open at once. These days you should have 1GB of RAM, at the very least.

GPU/VideoCard/Graphics Card: This is a gamers wet dream; where most of them can drop close to 600 bucks without blinking if their pockets will allow. This is what you hook your monitor up to. For the most part, unless you are doing some serious graphics editing or gaming, a sub $200 dollar graphics card will usually do the trick for all your needs in todays world. However if you are a gaming type and you are looking for a more fine tuned search, the GPU can get kinda complicated. One thing to look for is onboard memory. This is RAM for your graphics card’s CPU. Feel free to comment below and I will answer any questions on this, mainly because this post will get a little heavy if I get into the details here.

Hard Drives/Hard Disks/Hard Disk Drive (HDD): This one is easy to remember. Your hard drive is your long term memory. The more space you have on your Hard Disk, the more movies, pictures, applications, games, files …etc, you can store on your computer. Measured most often today in Gigabytes (GB), the more GB you have, the more storage you have. Think of GB as the square footage in a storage container, and the different terms Megabytes and GB for example are the metrics. 1024 Bytes = Kilobyte, 1024 Kilobytes = Megabyte, and so on.

The Motherboard: If your buying a pre-built computer, feel free to skip this as it will usually have no effect on your purchase, despite your needs. Anyone else: the Motherboard is simply the congregation point for all the nonsense above. It is where you parts get plugged into and have a means to communicate with each other. That’s about it. Compatibility is the only thing you need to worry about here; whether the parts your thinking about buying will work on the board your buying and some other minor adjustments but for the most part it will not effect your computer that much.

There are a few other components in computers that are definitely required when building a computer, but for the most part they are self explanatory and not a major area that will effect your decision making when purchasing a new computer. Especially in situations where you are not building the computer yourself.

Hopefully this post has addressed some of the questions in your mind. Got any other questions? Have different opinions? Please let me know in a comment below.