How To Change Major Components In Your PC

Hi, I'm Steve from PC Paramedics. Today, I'd like to take you through the major components that you'll find inside your PC and how to change some of them. So let's go through the major components you'll find inside your PC, and for this, I've stolen my colleague Danny's PC, a little one he calls Deidre.

I'm sure he won't mind me borrowing Deidre for a few minutes. Having taken Deirdre's side panel off, you'll see a number of wires and a couple of electronic boards, and a big whirly fan. If we come back outside of the PC to those components that I've assembled, you'll see the big electronic board commonly known as the motherboard with the cooling fan sitting on top of it.

That cooling fan sits on top of the CPU or central processor unit. Central processor unit is held in place by what's called a ZIFS socket, a zero insertion force socket. There is a clip on it.

We push the clip down and open up the catch and there is our CPU sitting inside the motherboard. Let's put it back in, there's only one way round it can go. Drop it into the socket.

Put the cover down and then pull down the spring catch. So, our motherboard is sitting here and our central processing unit is sitting in this place. That can't run without a cooling fan.

So our cooling fan will sit atop. Other major components you've probably heard of are the RAM or random access memory; we have four banks for our random access memory in this particular motherboard. And for purposes of demonstration, only one of them is populated.

One of the things you might want to do is go to your local PC store and purchase some additional RAM and install it. It's as simple as clicking back the two sockets and taking the RAM out. Putting the new RAM in is the reverse operation.

The RAM has a key way that is off center so that there's only one way around it can go. And there is a key corresponding to that key way sitting off center in the RAM socket. We place the RAM in its correct position through the guides and just give it a gentle click home and the two socket retainers will click into place in the détentes in the RAM board.

So changing your RAM or adding more RAM to your PC is broadly as similar as that. Additional parts you'll see are expansion slots. These white ones are known as PCI expansion slots and this black one is typically for a graphics card.

And that's known as a PCI express slot. I've got a graphics card here. On the graphics card is cooling fins and the contacts that will make contact with the motherboard.

Installing your graphics card is as simple as locating the correct slot and again, one good firm press down and your graphics card is in place coming back to the PCI expansion slots. They're for a number of things. You might want to include a high quality sound card such as this particular one I've got, a sound blaster sound card well known within the industry.

Again, it installs in exactly the same fashion. There's a keyway so there's only one way around it can go located in the slot and a firm click down and it's installed. Removals, reversed, on most motherboards these days, there are a number of connectors on the back.

The blue one is for connecting to the monitor. The SVGA socket on the top here is an Ethernet socket. And then we have on this particular board 5 USB2 sockets.

Over on the right hand side here, we have 5.1 surround sound sound output system, so clearly on this motherboard, there is already a sound card. And the sound card I previously showed you wouldn't be needed on this particular motherboard.

So that's the central processing unit, the bit that does all the crunching, basically the engine of the computer. Expansion slots for various purposes such as drawing high quality graphics. Random access memory for short term memory.

It's volatile memory, anything in the random access memory will be lost when you take the power off. So where do programs sit? They sit on the hard disk, your long term