• Intel® Pentium® 4 processor 2.6GHz with 400MHz frontside bus
• 512MB PC2100 DDR SDRAM for multitasking power, expandable to 4.0GB
• Cache Memory 512KB L2 cache
• DVD+RW/CD-RW drive; 48x maximum speed CD-ROM drive
• 120.0GB Ultra DMA hard drive
• ATI RADEON 9200 AGP 8X graphics card with 128MB DDR video memory
• 6 high-speed USB 2.0 ports and 2 IEEE 1394 (FireWire) ports
• Integrated 10/100Base-T network interface; V.92 high-speed data/fax modem
• USB optical mouse and HP Media Center keyboard
• Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004 operating system preinstalled

1) What does the processor do?

2) What is stored in main memory (RAM)?

3) What is stored on the hard disk?

4) What is the purpose of cache memory?

5) What terms relate to interconnection of internal PC components?

6) What terms relate to interconnection of external PC components?

7) What is a KB, MB, GB, MHz, GHz?8) What is the role of a compiler?

9) What advantages do high-level languages (Ada, C, C++, Java, COBOL, etc.) have over assembly language?

10) Why do people program in assembly language (AL)?

Instruction/Machine Cycle of stored-program computer - repeat all day

1. Fetch Instruction - read instruction pointed at by the program counter (PC) from memory into Instr. Reg. (IR)

2. Decode Instruction - figure out what kind of instruction was read

3. Fetch Operands - get operand values from the memory or registers

4. Execute Instruction - do some operation with the operands to get some result

5. Write Result - put the result into a register or in a memory location

(Note: Sometime during the above steps, the PC is updated to point to the next instruction.)