Computer Awareness GK Questions with Answers – Page 28

The kernel is the central part of the operating system and is the portion that is loaded at boot time and stays resident in main memory for as long as the computer is running.

Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory is erased by applying a voltage, one byte at a time, while the chip stays soldered in place, which is why it is used for settings that must survive a power cut and yet be changed occasionally, such as the configuration data of a…

The 3.5-inch high-density floppy disk, the square plastic diskette with a metal shutter, was formatted to 1.44 MB, and that figure is still asked in computer awareness papers because it anchors the small end of the capacity ladder.

An SSD is built from flash memory, itself a block-erasable form of EEPROM, which traps charge in floating-gate cells.

The operating system reserves an area of the hard disk, called the swap space or the page file, and moves pages a program is not actively using out to it.

Cache is a small block of static RAM that keeps the instructions and data most recently used by the processor.

A Digital Versatile Disc uses a shorter wavelength laser and finer pits than a compact disc, so one side with one recording layer holds about 4.7 GB; a double-layer disc of the same size holds roughly 8.5 GB.

Random Access Memory holds a bit only while it is powered, whether the cell is a flip-flop in static RAM or a leaking capacitor in dynamic RAM.

Every step in the ladder of storage units multiplies by 1,024, because 1,024 is 2 raised to the power 10 and memory is addressed in binary.

An Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory chip carries a small quartz window over the silicon; ultraviolet light shone through that window releases the trapped charge from every cell at once and returns the chip to its blank state, after which it can be programmed again.

Dynamic RAM stores each bit as a charge on a very small capacitor, and that charge leaks away in a few milliseconds, so the memory controller has to read and rewrite every cell continuously.

A nibble is half a byte, that is four binary digits, and it matters because one nibble is written as exactly one hexadecimal digit, from 0 to F. That is why memory addresses in hexadecimal are read four bits at a time.

A register is built into the CPU itself and holds the word the arithmetic and logic unit is operating on at that instant, so it is read and written in a single clock cycle.

In Microsoft PowerPoint, pressing Ctrl + M adds a new slide right after the one you are on, using the layout of the current slide.

Windows is proprietary, or closed-source: Microsoft keeps its source code private and sells it under a licence that does not let users study, change or redistribute the code.

A hard disk is secondary storage: the CPU cannot work on its contents directly, and data must first be copied into main memory.

A memory card keeps data in flash memory, a semiconductor chip with no moving parts, so it is solid-state storage and not magnetic.

A LAN joins computers and devices inside a small area such as one room, one building or a campus.

An operating system is the system software that loads when a laptop starts and then runs the machine: it shares out memory, decides which program gets the processor and for how long, keeps files and folders in order on the disk, talks to the keyboard, screen and printer through device…

HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol and it is the set of rules by which a browser asks a web server for a page and the server sends it back, which is how data on the World Wide Web is reached.