Computer Hardware

The terms northbridge and southbridge are semi-arbitrary names for two microprocessor support chips. These names were selected because of the common practice of drawing one above (north) and the other below (south) of the microcomputer's main bus on the schematic of the microcomputer and have nothing to do with their functions (only the location they were usually drawn at on the schematics). The official names for these two support chips by function are Memory Controller Hub (MCH) and Input/Output Controller Hub (ICH) respectively.

Modern microprocessors, due to increasing ability to put larger amounts of circuitry on each chip, have been progressively incorporating the functions of these chips internally, making the chips themselves obsolete.

It doesn't really have 255 heads. It most probably has one platter and two heads, at most.

You see, most HDDs today (anything newer than, say, 1998?) use LBA - that's Logical Block Addressing. It's a matter of simplicity, because new disks use something called zone bit recording, which means that on each given track, the further away from the center, the more sectors there are.

You see, disks can be addressed either physically (by mapping exactly one sector to a C/H/S position), or logically.

C/H/S, which stands for Cylinder/Head/Sector, is hanging around from the old MFM disks and DOS days, when disks were addressed physically. Physically here means that there was no translation to actual locations - BIOS handled the disk I/O. Unfortunately, this separation, combined with BIOS's inherent 16-bit-ness has quickly developed into a problem when new disks of great capacities (above 4GB) could not be addressed in this manner. They still can't be, to be honest, and the information given to BIOS is a bit pro-forma in that it doesn't tell the whole story. DOS programs can still access a PORTION of the space that way, but in order for the operating system to use the full space available, it has to understand LBA or access the hardware directly (which most OSes, Windows included, do).

So, again, these values have no real meaning. They certainly don't describe the physical properties of the disk. You see, there are up to two heads for any given platter, and as such, Your disk would have to have 128 platters! They're about 1mm thick, and with the heads in place, they take up some 5-6mm. That way, the disk would have to be some 77cm thick! No, these numbers are provided so that the BIOS and old (legacy) DOS programs can still make some use of the disk at all.

Keep in mind that this information is STILL used today, mostly by OS loaders like NTLDR, which need to only access a very small portion of space at the beginning of the disk. There resides a program that can take care of LBA addressing from that point. This is so that BIOS can handle calling the operating system starting procedure even with these limitations in place.

Here are a couple of quick options:

1: Use two sound cards. Have your internet radio media player use one of them and your DVD media player use the other.

2: Use one sound card, but only get one channel of each at a time. I don't know if this will work exactly, but you could fork the signal, playing just the left channel of video at the computer and just the right channel of radio in the other room. Use the panning feature in your media players to force audio through either specific channel.

A lot depends on your configuration, I guess, and how much money you want to spend.

• Step 1: The original definition of a computer processor was any machine that could perform arithmetic and logic functions. Today a computer processor is usually defined as a microprocessor chip, or CPU, that executes commands and runs computer programs. One of the biggest manufacturers of microprocessors is the Intel Corporation. Typical computer programs that must be processed by CPUs include Internet browsers, word processors, and image manipulation software. Computer processors perform four basic functions to process data and run computer programs.

• Step 1: Every instruction that a CPU processes is represented by a series of numbers. Once initiated, the numbers representing the requested action are stored in memory. The CPU then fetches or retrieves the instruction from program memory. A program counter, or PC, keeps track of the computer processor's location in the active program. If the memory is slow, the CPU may stall while waiting for the instruction to be returned.

• Step 1: The CPU then analyzes the instruction it fetched and decides how it should be processed. Typically a particular group of numbers in the instruction indicate which operation to perform, and in what sequence. In more advanced CPUs, a microprogram may also be used to help decode instructions for the computer processor. CPU microprograms can sometimes be modified (from the factory default) to change the way the processor translates instructions.

• Step 1: Depending on the action required, the CPU then sends segments of the original instruction to the most appropriate section of the processor. For example, if additional actions are requested, an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) is attached to a group of inputs and outputs. The inputs provide the numbers to be processed, and the outputs contain the final sum or response to the request.

• Step 1: After executing the instruction, the processor writes the results back into memory. Sometimes the results are written to an internal register for quick access, while in other cases the results are written directly to the main memory. After the instruction has been executed and written to memory, the process repeats by fetching the next instruction value in the program counter. In more advanced computer processors, it is possible for multiple commands to be fetched, decoded, and executed simultaneously.

http://www.answerbag.com/articles/How-Does-a-Computers-Processor-Work/3a8590f3-775a-16a0-900c-bd4f23f606a7

A chipset is a group of integrated circuits (microchips) that can be used together to serve a single function and are therefore manufactured and sold as a unit. For example, one chipset might combine all the microchips needed to serve as the communications controller between a processor and memory and other devices in a computer.