Transcript for:
Motherboard and Cable Basics

Howdy Folks welcome to module one of the CompTIA a plus course this first module of the full course is titled as you can see installing motherboards and connectors the main sections or topics we'll be covering in this specific module are the following the first will be cable types and connectors then we'll be covering the section called install and configure motherboards followed by the third and last section called Legacy cable types so those are the three main topics or should I say sections we'll be covering they are however not the only topics we'll be covering though folks if you'd like a better idea of what we'll be covering in this specific module of a plus you can find a more detailed list with timestamps in the video description down below alrighty now before we go ahead and jump into the first main section if any of you folks are new to my channel I will be doing a dedicated video for each of the 20 modules of the full official CompTIA a plus 1100 series course I also happen to do free training on lots of other courses from various vendors so if you're curious on what else I train feel free to go and check out the channel if you folks haven't done it already do your home me a favor and blink that like button it really helps me get this free training in front of more people out there that actually needs it quite often cannot afford to pay for training if you yourself would like to know when I upload new lessons or courses maybe consider subscribing otherwise you might miss it well now that I've got that selfless promo out of the way let's jump into the first main section which was called cable types and connectors now within this first section the first topic we'll be discussing is personal computers all right so since this is a plus we're going to start you guys off nice and slow at the beginning starting with the system case now with the system case topic you get what we call All in One versus Tower so I think just to help elaborate on what I'm talking about here is a picture of an all-in-one I want you guys to specifically look at the screen there ignore the mouse and the keyboard so that screen there believe it or not is actually a full-blown computer that is an all-in-one and often you'll find it's actually a touch screen as well so you can touch this screen the actual motherboard the ramp chips everything of your computer is within that screen pretty much like a laptop come to think of it if you look at a laptop everything you need from your computer is within the laptop if you look at Tower here's an example of a tower now that might be a computer but it doesn't have everything you need for example the screen is now missing this no screen you cannot press any buttons other than a power button and the restart button so that is an example of a tower so the previous one I showed you guys that wasn't all in one everything will be in the screen and this one is a tower both of them have benefits both of them have drawbacks if you look at an all-in-one they obviously take up way less space you can put a little bugger on your desk and that's it it's pretty much all you need if you look at a tower case that takes up a heck of a lot more space a tower on the other hand is a lot cheaper and a lot easier to go and upgrade if you look at the all-in-one that we had earlier that one is very expensive to go and buy you know all in one just at first glance is going to be very expensive to go and buy and when you want to go and upgraded you'll find often it's not possible to do so and if it is it's going to cost you an arm and a leg now since we're talking about towers of computers let's talk about the front panel ports and features of these Tower cases if this feels like it's a very easy topic you have to keep in mind a plus is also designed for people that's brand new and I.T that's never done ID before so we're going to start things off nice and slow of easy topics and as we go along in this course further into the modules and all that the topic is going to get more and more advanced and more and more complex obviously as for the front panels as you guys can see there we've got a couple of USB ports on this one we've got an audio jack we've got a mic Jack we've got a power button we've got an optical drive pretty much standard what you would expect to find on the average tower case now there are Tower cases out there that has multiple multiple Optical drives some of them have none if I'm being honest I think majority of computers these days will probably come out of no optical drive and that actually includes laptops I mean when lost if you've seen someone use a DVD or a CD on anything people just don't use that anymore and the manufacturers the factories they know that so they just remove these Optical drives all together Bringing Down the price of the unit which means it's cheaper for you you can afford it and then it also means they're going to get more sales it's a win-win everybody wins because we know you're not going to use it anyway now as for the actual ports you'll find on the average computer you will find USB ports and sound ports audio jacks in the front there are cases where you might actually find them on the top of the case you know especially if you look at some gaming cases some of these gaming cases you get these days are really really fancy you'll find a couple of USB ports or audio jacks to the front or the top power buttons restart buttons they can be all over the place quite frankly um you'll find some of them have got fancy lights some of them don't but in essence they do the same thing it'll turn the machine on and they're allow you to restart the machine let's talk about the side panel now since we're talking about the side panel I think this is a very poor picture to show you guys so I think let me flip this box around here we are looking at the side of a computer tower case so obviously the side panel has now been removed and if you remove that you can effectively see the internal components of this machine I suppose one might call this the organs of the computer you'll be able to see your machine's motherboard you'll be able to see the ram modules sometimes referred to as RAM chips you'll be able to see your graphics card hard drives power supply unit you name it you'll be able to see all of it the insides of your computer case so what you folks will notice is almost each and every machine tends to look somewhat different compared to the last one so they all have a motherboard they all have hard drives and RAM modules and all of that but where you find the power supply unit for example is not necessarily the same for cases where you find the hard drives these days is not necessarily the same four cases especially if you look at the fancy gaming cases you get and also if you consider the fact that you get solid state hard drives and mechanical hard drives nowadays where you find these components could vary from one unit to another I mean here's another example of another system unit that I've got for you guys so in essence OnePlus One will always be two here but just keep in mind they might not look exactly the same if you compare one to another one especially if you're going to open a laptop or compare it to another laptop let's talk about the rear panel ports and features so I think let's first flip this box around so here is the back of a box and there you can see the rear ports so the top left of this picture there you can see the ports of the motherboard now if you ever wondered why those ports fitting perfectly into that little panel there that is because that little panel with the motherboard slides through actually comes with the motherboard so if you were to go and buy yourself a computer case or if you're going to buy one for a client and you're now about to go and build this machine completely yourself from scratch what you'll notice is where the motherboard is supposed to go you know where those ports are supposed to stick out it's just one giant big hole a rectangle hole and if you were to open the box of the motherboard one of the things you'll find in that box besides the motherboard is that little aluminum panel so you're gonna go and open your your computer box you're going to open the side panel and you're going to press that panel in you know from the inside towards the outside and it's actually going to go and click into place and you'll find that panel perfectly aligns with your new motherboard and if you ever find yourself needing to replace the motherboard of a different one you're going to first have to take out the old motherboard once you've done so from the outside you will press that panel towards the inside and it's actually going to shoot inside it's going to shoot out and then you just go and open the new motherboard box take out the new aluminum panel and you just put it in as if it was the first one of course if you look towards the bottom of that 60 Minute case you'll find us a couple other ports especially if you look at the middle area there whole bunch of graphic Sports and stuff so 10 to 1 this case is a gaming case or something of that sort you can see it definitely has a graphics card of some kind so on average those little holes there with the graphics card slides through would normally be blocked by some sort of aluminum or plastic cover and you can normally just click them out of place or you have to break them open yes you have to actually break them open in some cases although the newer Frontier cases these days you don't actually have to go and break them open you just go and click them open slide in your graphics card into the motherboard and into that exact slot and if you need to go and remove the card for whatever reason one day you can always just go and slide those little plastic covers back into place if you look way at the bottom of this case that would be your PSU so all it guys and it just normally refer to that as the PSU which is short for power supply unit now in this specific case it happens to be the bottom but you'll find for the majority of cases out there it's actually at the top so your average office computer your average home computer would probably have that PSU at the top of the case the reality of the matter is it doesn't actually matter where it is as long as it's in the box as long as it's able to reach the motherboard and provide power to the motherboard it doesn't actually matter where it is so the newer fancier cases especially if you go look at the gaming cases and those kinds of cases this PSU normally tends to be towards the bottom of the case so this is probably going to be a gaming case I mean the fact that it's got a graphics card tells me it's a gaming case anywho let's move on to our second Topic in this section that would be Universal serial bus cables now doesn't that sound familiar so Universal serial bus first of all is the actual word for USB so whenever people say USB that is actually what it stands for Universal serial bus people so the first thing we want to talk about here is USB connector types you actually get many kinds of USB connector types now looking at the picture I have here for you folks on the right specifically the top part of the picture with USB 2.0 if you look at the one at the top left which falls into the category of 2.0 this one is called type A it allows you to connect one end to the host being your computer in most cases and the other end to assorted peripheral devices which we don't actually really see anymore this connector should be inserted with the USB symbol facing up by the way you'll find depending on what kind of cable we're using these days sometimes the symbol has to face upwards other times it doesn't really matter it's a potato potato situation so the newer and the more modern the cable is the less it actually matters but of the older cables it matters if you look at the connector right next to it which is called type B this connector is used for large devices large devices like printers and we still very widely use this cable mind you but you'll more commonly find this in a home environment small office home office environment we don't really find these in medium to large size companies because where they normally have those big printers and those ones that normally couldn't hit via network cable or connected via Wireless where we don't really use the USB cables looking at the connector called type B mini it's a smaller peripheral device connector they were mostly used on things like the first digital cameras we used to get but we don't really use these either anymore they'll have a hard time finding a device these days it actually still uses this kind of cable then we also have the connector called type B beam grow now this one might ier to most of you since it's an updated connector for smaller devices such as smartphones and tablets all in all a USB cable can feature type A to type a connectors or can convert from one type to another for example you can convert type A to type B or you can convert from type A to Microsoft type B now as for USB 3 those are obviously the newer types of cables which generally are a heck of a lot faster than the old USB 2 cables So within USB 3 there are new versions of the type A type B and type B micro connectors with additional signaling pins and wires you folks will notice that often with USB 3 the actual connector itself will have some blue in it somewhere and the actual USB 3 Port itself will also have some balloon that's somewhere along the line this is usually to indicate that it's a USB 3 port or a usb-free connector so whenever you see blue then you know USB free even though they use different colors to show us which is which they are actually somewhat compatible with one another to certain extent you can for example go and take a USB to type a cable and plug it into USB 3 type a port and vice versa they will work just fine as the only thing you're going to notice is the speed is not going to be you know to its full extent it's not going to live up to its full potential since it's going to be bottlenecking now what you cannot do is for example plug a USB 3 Type B cable into USB to type B Port those definitely are not going to work folks anywho here we have some other types of cables HDMI and DisplayPort video cables so HDMI is short for high definition multimedia interface if you are wondering no you don't need to know what HDMI stands for in the actual exams they won't ask you that so I wouldn't worry about it as long as you guys know what an HDMI cable is used for you're good that's all you need to know for the exams now here I have a picture for you guys of a normal sized HDMI cable on the left and a mini HDMI cable on the right you can't really tell the difference much in this picture but I assure you there is quite a size difference in real life I haven't really seen the mini HDMI cable being used that much but the normal one on the other hand that one is used all over with just about anything these days anything that's got a display basically you'll find pretty much any monitor screen TV you name it as HDMI ports you'll find them on most computer graphics cards and laptops as well and the list goes on and on and on it's a very popular high definition video cable that has the ability to also send audio over the cable most folks only use them for video though but you need to make sure you remember when HDMI has the ability to transmit audio signals over the same cable at the same time there are questions in the exam about that folks so watch out for that now speaking of video cables you also get DisplayPort video cables whereas a picture for your folks at the bottom right you'll notice that it first launch the DisplayPort cable and the connector looks very much the same as the HDMI one if you look closer though you'll see the connector is in fact different you can not plug the one cable into the other one's Port it just won't fit so some of you folks are probably wondering now what is the difference between the HDMI and the DisplayPort cable well the truth is they're actually very much the same the HDMI cables came out first and were out for quite some time before the DisplayPort cables came out the HDMI was developed by consumer electronics companies and requires a Realty to use so that's where display port comes into the picture if you see where I'm going of this it was developed as a royalty free standard by the video electronic standard Association which is basically an organization that represents PC graphics adapter and display technology companies all in all you will see the display port option on a lot more devices these days especially graphics cards or PCS now moving on to some other cable tabs we get here we have Thunderbolt and lightning cables not even sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly so starting off the Thunderbolt cable this cable is actually very interesting not only can it be used as a display device like DisplayPort or HDMI which we literally just spoke of it can actually in fact also be used as a general peripheral interface like USB how cool is that here's the picture on the right of the Thunderbolt cable just in case you guys are wondering what it looks like so you folks want to or need to you can actually go ahead and connect the computer monitor that's got a display port to a thunderbolt port on a computer itself with a suitable adapter of course once your folks can also go and do a thunderbolt which is also possible of the DisplayPort mind you you can go on daisy chain multiple monitors to a single port pretty nifty right let me tell you that's very useful in some cases so if you find yourself in a sticky situation where you or a user only has one DisplayPort or one Thunderbolt Port you can in fact actually go ahead and connect multiple monitors on that one single port this is called daisy chaining watch out for that by the way that's also going to be in the exam all right and then we also have the lightning connector here's a picture of one it's the white one on the right as if you didn't know that so this Apple's iPhone and iPad mobile devices use a property Lightning Portal connector the lightning Port is found only on Apple's mobile devices so if you need to connect this device to something like a computer you will need an adapter cable now the good news is they're very easy to find it will have to be a lightning to USB a or a lightning D USBC but they are very easy to come by so don't worry about it ew let's move on to SATA hard drive cables so Sato first of all is short for serial advanced technology attachment SATA for short so Soto you know if you guys are familiar of sorta is something we use when it comes to Optical drives and our hard drives which is storage so there's a replacement for the old Potter hard drives in apart our cables and stuff like that so so let's first of all talk about the data connector so you get two kinds of cables when it comes to soft you get the one for data and you get the one for power so when it comes to data here's a picture of you guys on the right so you can see there's a red cable now I would say the red one is probably one of the the most common ones you guys are gonna get but the reality is the color doesn't matter it can be any color of the rainbow so the most common colors you'll probably encounter when it comes to these Solitaire data cables are red pink yellow orange but also commonly come you know fourth and other colors I mean I've seen them in black and white and pink and blue any color you can imagine is what they come forth they still do the same thing in the end of the day so you can go and plug one in into the motherboard which end it doesn't matter because it's the same on both sides you plug one into the motherboard you plug the other end of that data cable into the actual optical drive so in other words the old DVD drives or series ROM drives probably going to be a DVD Run Drive or you plug it into a hard drive all right let's face it it's probably going to be a hard drive because nobody uses DVD drives these days and now that kind of cable we get when we talk about SATA is the actual power cable itself at the bottom right here is a picture of you guys of what I would normally look like you'll find the power supply these days has various kinds of power cables some of them are the old white Molex ones we'd be used to use in the old hard drives and the old Optical drives and when they also have these black ones that is for the newer SATA drives SATA hard drive I've saw the optical drives so the good news is both of these cables the DOTA one and the power one can only plug in one way if you go and get one you know a picture of a high resolution picture of one online or if you happen to have one close by you'll notice that connector can only plug in one way so there's certain pieces of plastic that's missing which basically forces you to be able to only plug that little doohickey in one way now speaking of the old Molex connectors which I just mentioned let's just put out as a bullet point here that is what it looks like so the bottom left that is the one that we used to use for donkey years we used to use those for decades I mean you might still find find them you never go buy yourself a power supply these days depending on how fast it is and how new it is you might actually still encounter a power supply that has got a couple of those more legs connectors on it these days we more commonly only use them for the case fans some of the case fans actually do take those as is other times the case fans will take a smaller version the Molex connector so that's basically what we used to use in the old days and the old hard drives and the old Optical drives just in case you guys were curious so that's the mollix anyway folks guess what we have reached the end of the first section or the first main topic in this module that brings us to the second main section or the second main topic in this module which is install and configure motherboards now the first topic we're going to be talking about in this second section is electrical safety and ESD if you don't know what ESD is that is short for electrostatic discharge so before we can go ahead and install anything on a computer you know whether to be a laptop desktop server you name it there's certain things you need to be aware of and there's certain things you need to go and do or practice before you can actually go ahead and install any components into computer or before you can go ahead and troubleshoot or remove any comparison computer so that is obviously why we talk about electricity here and all that so let's start off the more important one out of the two here which is your own safety electrical safety so before you go ahead and open a computer box a server a laptop a printer whatever the heck it might be you should always go and unplug the device it's another off by the wall socket flip the switch make sure it's dead and just for extra precaution pull out the cable completely pull it out from the wall and what I want to add on to that which is not actually part of this course you'll find at the back of the power supply this is not something you'll find on all power supplies but half of the power supplies the back actually has a switch as well which you can go and turn off not really necessary to go and flip that if you've plugged it out of the wall but you know what do it anyway rather safe than sorry I say so the very first thing we do for obvious reasons you plug everything out let's move on to the topic of electrostatic discharge what the cheese is that so let me start by saying did you know the human body has enough static electricity in it to blow circuitry it can blow things like a motherboard it can blow things like your RAM chips Ram modules whatever you want to go and call them you can blow your graphics card and so on and so forth so what I mean by that is if you were to go and just touch your motherboard I kid you not just touch it or just to go ahead and just touch the RAM chips or whatever the case might be you can actually blow those components with the electricity that's stored in your human body yeah did you know that that is a fun fact so that becomes a bit problematic you know when we need to go and install components uninstall them troubleshoot them and all that kind of stuff so with that being said some of the things we're going to be using is anti-static tools so we're not just going to go and use normal screwdrivers or normal tweezers and stuff you'll find that we computed ignitions use anti-static screwdrivers and the static tweezers anti-static disc anti-static that all the tools we use they look like normal tools but they're not they're not conductive they're anti-static what you should also go and use and I can be honest with you guys almost nobody uses this in real life it's an anti-static wrist strap now you might want to be wondering what the heck is an anti-static wrist strap so when anti-static wrist strap is a strap you put around your wrist or your ankle they say wrist strap but you can actually put it around your ankle as well it's got a little cable and the edge of that cable or the internet cable is a little alligator clip and you're supposed to go and clip that alligator clip to a rubber mat or clip it to the frame of the computer you're working on preferably the inside of the frame which is conductive now in case you guys are still wondering what the heck I'm talking about here is a picture of what an anti-static wrist strap would look like now you know just do a little disclosure that picture is of a little black slash yellow one but in reality they're normally blue most commonly but it doesn't really matter what color they are you can still see what it looks like so you're supposed to go and strap that around your arm or your leg or whatever or on your body it doesn't actually matter as long as it's on your body and the little alligator clip needs to preferably be clipped to a rubber mat or be clipped to the actual frame of the computer once you've done that you can actually go ahead and touch the components now speaking of clipping this to the frame let me show you guys another picture here's a picture of what it looks like when this bra goes ahead and clips this thingy to the frame of a computer case you can see there it's on the inside of the frame so yeah that's what you're supposed to do according to the actual official a plus course it's what you're supposed to do according to the official slides the official manual and according to the manual but the fact of the matter is in real life none of us actually do that nobody does that I don't even do that I've never done that but I'm telling you guys about it nonetheless because they will ask you about that the exam I guarantee it you will get questions about that in the exam but as soon as you've written these exams and passed these exams and you know what go and forget about it nobody actually does that you might wonder okay but if nobody does that isn't that a bit of a problem ah yes and no so in the old days and when I say all those this was as recently as 10 years ago motherboards and components were that sensitive nowadays these components are so robust you know you can go and touch them and nothing's gonna happen but even if you are concerned about that you know what you can go and do just touch the actual frame itself so if you're standing in front of the case you can actually go and open the side panel and before you go ahead and touch something inside the Box what you can do is you just touch the frame of the case preferably the inside of the frame because the outside is sometimes made out of plastic or other kinds of weird metal so you want to go and touch the inside of the frame once you've touched the inside of the frame then you can go and touch random components inside the case and you're not gonna go and blow anything why because you as a human just discharge directly into the frame something you want to keep in mind though when you do this is if you walk away from that case let's say it's just a couple of steps even if it's not on a carpet or something you actually could what's possibly generate enough electricity again to go and blow something so every time you come back to the computer you want to go and discharge again and again and again in the beginning it's obviously going to require a lot of concentration for you to do that and to remember to do that but as time goes by it's going to become muscle memory you're going to do it instinctively without even thinking about it that is what the average technician does that is what I do I just touch the inside of the case discharge and then I do go and play with whatever I need to go and play inside and then yeah as easy as that that's what people do in real life but according to the exam according to the course guys you need to use an anti-static wrist strap or an anti-static ankle strap that will be the answering the exam so if they tell you anything regarding ESD the user is trying to avoid ESD or what can you go and use to prevent ESD anything in that regarding exam the answer will always be an anti-static wrist strap in the exam all right moving on to motherboard connector types now here on the right I've got a nice little picture for you folks it's actually the same one we used in the previous version of a plus so you'll notice if you go and do the old version of a plus and the new version of a plus there is a lot of content with overlaps like I said in the beginning of this video actually more in the introduction video of this course it's about 90 to 95 the same content so quantity on literally just went and reshuffled the contents the different modules so yeah you guys are gonna see some of the same pictures if you've watched my previous version of a plus here and there you're going to see some of the same topics same pictures same everything because well it's the same course technically speaking now looking at the picture we've got here on the right if you look at the one that says CPU socket so CPU is short for central processing unit that is effectively where the brains of your computer would go into the reason why we call it CPU Central in other words is because it used to actually be in the center of the motherboard nowadays it's still kind of in a center you know more towards the top but it's not exactly in the middle of the motherboard so yeah as time goes by things tend to change I mean that's nothing new in life so the CPU is still in the middle of you compare it from left to right but from bottom to top it's more towards the top now obviously so if you look at on the right where it says memory slots so in this specific picture we've got four slots for memory slots or memory module slots on the average motherboard you can expect to find about two so I would say four is more for the expensive or more expensive motherboards you know gaming motherboards those kinds of things you'll also notice that those memory slots are two different colors two of them are dark so if we look at the first one and the third one the very dark look at the second one and the fourth one the lighter in color the fact of the matter is that colors doesn't actually matter I mean they're gonna actually be any kind of the rainbow what does matter is which ones are the same color whatever color that might be you'll normally notice the first one and the third one tend to be the same color the second one and a fourth one tend to be the same color and so on and so forth that is because they're on the same channel more on that once we actually get to the ram section so we're gonna probably get to that in this specific module so let's just hold on to that then we've got disk drive connectors where the bottom right on that motherboard so that is going to be your saw talk connectors for those of you guys that's Familiar of sorta now this is actually a pretty neat motherboard because if I look at this picture you can see that they are sliding in from the right side where not from the top the average motherboard I've dealt with at the majority of my clients majority of gaming board and even my own motherboards these software connectors generally type tend to you know plug in from the top and it's very often in that same area it's just normally from the top and that becomes a bit of a problem because if you want to go and plug in very large expansion cards like graphics cards these cards very often tend to go over those ports which makes it next to impossible to go and plug in any SATA cables so you cannot plug in any hard drives you cannot plug in any Optical drives because the cables are going to be in a way which means you cannot plug in your graphics card or if you do plug in your graphics card you're not going to be able to plug in those devices so it's an either or kind of situation then so some clever block out there came up with this clever tactic where instead of having you plug them in from the top they have now kind of swapped the ports around so that you can actually plug in from the side and I think the intention was to accommodate the folks that actually have a fancy graphics card so that's probably what they had in mind they probably saw a lot of people were complaining about it so thank goodness to whoever came up with this tactic so yeah but you might possibly still find them facing upwards if you look at the bottom right we've got adapter card slots how many you've got really depends on the make and the model of your motherboard and also a little bit about you know how much you pay for it the more you pay the more you get like most things in life so if you look at the the little white slot there the one that's much lighter in color than the other ones that would be your graphics card slot or should I say your main graphics card slot this is known as your pcie the E stands for Express now the average motherboard will only have one of these if you're lucky normally they would have at least one but depending on how much money you're willing to throw at your motherboard you might potentially actually have two maybe three or even four of those slots the more you pay the more you get so if you have more than one graphics card slot you can in fact go and put in more than one graphics card at the same time if you're wondering which one you're going to be connecting your monitor to your screen it's normally going to be the first one the main one which is the top all the other ones are secondary ones additional ones to give you increased graphics performance I don't actually recommend that because most of the time if you go and pull that stunt you're going to find the increase you're going to get on average it's somewhere between seven percent and twenty percent you'll actually be better off buying yourself one one graphic score which is slightly more expensive than one of those cards and I'm just putting that one card you can actually get more performance it's going to take up less space you're going to be able to buy a cheaper motherboard it's going to use less electricity with power in other words it's a win-win-win all the way so instead of paying let's say 2K for two cards which means it's 4K in total you can buy yourself a One graphics card which is worth 3K now and at one 3K graphics card is Just Gonna Give You benefits all the way including giving you more performance than the two cards which were would have been combined I'm not saying that's always going to be the case but usually that tends to be the case then way on the left there we've got i o ports so if you're not sure what that stands for let us input and output ports input would be something like your mouse your keyboard that kinds of stuff maybe a possibly a webcam output will probably be something like I don't know your printer your speakers if you look at something like the USB port that probably classifies as both input and output it really depends on what you're going to plug in there if you look at something like your VGA your DVI your HDMI your display ports those are all screen ports for your monitor so those are probably all external output ports if you think about it anyway so let's take a little bit of a closer look at this motherboard so here you can see same picture a little bit of a closer look so there is our CPU socket you'll find that every motherboard and every CPU out there has a different amount of pins now in the past yeah I would probably make this sound like it was a very long time ago but that's actually not that long ago the pins on average used to always be on the CPU and you know if you go and compare the price of the average motherboard and every CPU you would find the CPU normally tends to be way more expensive than the motherboard if I have to thumb suck it and just make up a couple of numbers the motherboard might cost you 500 and the CPU might cost you 3 000. now if you were to accidentally break one of these two which one would you prefer to go and break if it was me I would prefer to break the one it was cheaper which is probably the motherboard now unfortunately the pins used to always be on the CPU and if you paint a pin broker pin guess what you're gonna have to throw away or dispose of the more expensive one out of the two so some clever blow came up with the idea to put the pins on the motherboard side instead which is now referred to as LGA back in the day we used to call it PGA pin grid array Now LG is now known as land grid array which means depends are now on the motherboard and if you pay no breaker pin now you just replace the motherboard which might seem like a big deal because it's a big item but the reality is the motherboard is very often way cheaper than the CPU so trust me you want to rather replace the motherboard than the CPU because the CPU is going to cost you way more folks now if you want to go and build yourself a PC or build one for your client I would suggest you first start off by checking what CPU you want to buy what CPU does your customer want your user want or what CPU do you want if you for example decide on an i7 which one do you want because it's mainly i7s what kind of clock speed do you want one kind of cash do you want so once you decide on i7 that's going to give you reasonable performance and it's going to fit your pocket then you need to go and check what the socket size of that i7 CPU is I'm just using an i7 as an example this could be any kind of CPU so normally on the box of the CPU or the packaging waiver you know you can even check it online it tells you what socket it is if you don't know what the socket is that's the amount of pins it has so if it tells you in the box of the packaging or the labeling that it's 11 55 that means it's got 1155 pins or contact points for the pins because the pins are now on the motherboard so if you want to go and buy yourself a motherboard now which is probably going to be the next item on your agenda you need to go look for a motherboard that fits your pocket but also one that is a socket 1155 otherwise it's not going to be compatible with your CPU if I for example go buy a motherboard that's a socket 775 that means it's got 775 pins but my CPU has got 1155 contact points it's going to be a mismatch they're not going to be able to make contact with one another you need to make sure the CPU has got the same amount of contact points as the motherboard has pins so if your CPU is a 775 your motherboard needs to be a 775 so that's some of the things you need to keep in mind so I would suggest you start the CPU then you start the motherboard and once you've decided on the motherboard you go and check what kind of ram that motherboard takes if it takes DDR3 if it takes ddr4 or ddr5 you can check what kind of ram it takes and then you obviously just go and buy that Ram easy peasy right now as for the left hand side there you'll see they mentioned motherboard heatsinks now I'm going to be honest with you guys this motherboard has a lot of heatsinks normally they don't have that many so the average motherboard will have two heatsinks one of which is actually removable so the main heatsink the first one would only be on top of the CPU so once you have decided on a CPU you're gonna go and put it in there you're gonna put a little heat paste or thermal compound on top of that CPU more on that later we can actually get to that so don't worry about that just yet then you're gonna put your heat sink on top of the CPU we're also going to show you guys pictures of that later on in the cooling modules there's a whole module and section where we talk about Cooling and thermal compound and heat based so if you're wondering what all of those are do not fear about it we are going to discuss that in a later module it's all part of the course so you're going to put a heatsink on top of the CPU it's basically a piece of metal which is made out of aluminum and the reason why we do that is because that CPU gets very very hot and the idea here ultimately is the heat from that CPU that gets generated needs to be transferred into this piece of metal which is on top of it it's metal aluminum because it stays cool a lot longer and it absorbs heat a lot better than most metals and just as an extra precaution we normally go and hook up a fan on top of that heatsink which blows air between the veins of that heatsink so it works very very much the same as a cause radiator so you know as you drive around the water from the engine goes into a radiator and an air that's blowing in from the front only blows in through the fins of the radiator and that ultimately cools down the water and once it's cooled down it goes back into the engine to cool the engine down even further of course all right let's move on to memory slots they're still obviously on the topic of motherboards now we're looking more closer to the right side of the motherboard where we saw those Ram slots earlier which are known as memory slots so memory in a computer we're not talking about hard drive is referred to as RAM random access memory so the principal storage space for computer data and program instructions volatile memory that loses data when there is no power so you didn't do you know what they mean by that a ram chip is seen as volatile memory and that means if power is lost to the ram chip everything that was in that Ram chip is now lost so how this is going to work is when you start your machine or a user or customer or client starts their machine obviously there's an operating system in most cases there's a bunch of programs and data and stuff on there and whenever you or the user opens a program or a document or something eventually it's going to start displaying onto your screen it might possibly indicate on the taskbar that a couple of things are open now if you were to go and yank out the battery of that laptop or yank out the power cord of that desktop machine does that mean you've got to go and reinstall Windows reinstall all the programs and you know copy all the data back onto the machine no you don't have to do that you'll find it still on the machine when you start that machine you just need to go and reopen the program in question or reopen the document in question so what that means is that data was stored on the hard drive which is non-volatile so if power is lost whatever's on the hard drive is not lost because the hard drive is non-volatile now why did the programs close though and the documents close though because that was loaded into the ram modules which is in fact volatile so anything that you have got opener on your screen any programs games documents and files that that you've got open is currently in your RAM and if power has lost your machine whatever wasn't the ram in other words your temporary memory is lost not permanently lost it's just lost so when you start the machine again in question you're just gonna have to go and reload it back in to the RAM and this can be done by just opening the program with the game in question again or just opening the document of the files or whatever the case might be again that's going to load it back into the ram so the reason why we do that into RAM is because the ram is a lot faster than the hard drive so if we have to go and transfer data between the hard drive and the CPU ziggity zag ziggity exactly like that nothing would get done because it's just too freaking slow so the hard drive is still a nice place for long term storage so whatever you need to work on program wise game wise documents or files wise you're gonna go and click on those files or programs or whatever it might be it gets loaded into the ram which is much faster memory but unfortunately it is volatile and while you're working on that file or that game or that program all of that goes ziggity zag between your RAM chips and the CPU which is much much faster now if you look at that picture there as I've said earlier you'll find that those Ram slots there are different colors so the first one and the third one are very dark in color and the second one and a fourth one are very light in color I did mention to you folks earlier the colors doesn't actually really matter what does matter is which ones or which color but the colors themselves does not matter so the reason why the first one and the third one or the same color whatever that might be is because they are the same channel versus Cena's Channel One the reason why the second one the fourth one are the same colors because they are the same channel which would be seen as channel 2. so when you have only one ram chip it doesn't really matter which Ram slot you're gonna put that Ram chip and it will still work my suggestion to you folks would be to go and put it into the ram slot closest to the CPU because that's just close to the CPU and for a computer that has light years if you're gonna put it into the second slot away from the CPU or the slot that's third away from the CPU that has light years for your machine so you can actually make your PC a little bit faster by simply putting the ram chip into the slot closest to the CPU now if you happen to have a second ram chip you would not put it into the second slot you would put it into the third slot you have to fill up a Channel first before you can start a new one if you only have one you're going to start the channel closest to the CPU so that'll probably be that dark slot there so you're going to start at the club the slot closer to the CPU if you happen to have a second ram chip you would start with the second slot of that first channel which obviously would be the third one there you can see the third one and the first one is the same color if you have a third Ram chip you're gonna start the procedure all over again so now you're gonna start off a new channel but preferably you want to start at the slot that's closest to the CPU so you would start of slot 2. and if you happen to have a fourth Ram chip you would start by putting it into the second slot of Channel 2 which will be the fourth slot there so I hope that makes sense for you guys there's not a rule you have to put it into the slot loss 3 CPU but what is kind of a rule I would say is to make sure you put them into the same channel otherwise it's not going to work folks so you have to fill up a Channel first before you can start off a new channel all right so let's move to the bottom left of this motherboard so we did kind of look at this earlier when we spoke about graphics cards and expansion cards to a certain degree so now we're going to focus on this little coin there at the bottom left it's usually somewhere the bottom left there are cases where you might possibly find at the bottom right of a motherboard but it's more common to find this little doohickey at the bottom left of motherboard what is that coin it's a coin cell battery you're probably wondering to yourself why the heck would there be a battery on my motherboard now all motherboards have these batteries it allows your computer to keep track of certain things it allows your computer to remember certain things let me give an example have you ever plugged out I mean like completely plug out the battery of your laptop or completely plug out the power cord to a desktop PC have you ever done that and have you noticed that the computer always seems to keep track of its time it never really forgets what time it is it keeps track of the time so if it was a certain date in a certain time the computer would still remember that even though the battery was blocked out or even though the power cord was plugged out how the heck do you think that is possible it is because of that battery which is known as your CMOS battery in most cases so that allows the machine to remember time it allows it to remove all kinds of other things like the boot order so if your machine has to start by looking for a bootable device you know maybe at the hard drive first or the CD-ROM first or a flash drive first that is how your computer remembers where it needs to look for a bootable device first so if that battery starts becoming flat because all batteries eventually become flat you'll first notice this because of the timer the clock would start falling behind so if it's one o'clock in the afternoon you might find your computer will tell you it's 12 o'clock and now here you go and correct the time on your machine and after a day or a couple of days or so you'll find it starts falling behind and it starts falling behind and more and more and starts happening quicker and quicker that is an indication this battery is starting to run flat if it runs flat completely it's going to actually start causing issues in your machine I would not say it's not going to work at all but it does start causing issues on the machine you want to try and avoid that obviously so how long do these batteries last they normally last about five to ten years on average but I've actually seen this last about between 10 and 20 years on some machines so there has also been cases where I got to a client it's a machine that's only one year old two years old or less than five years old for the matter and the battery would be completely dead so I can't tell you why that happens it could be that maybe it's just a dud you know I suppose we get Duds it could be that when they made that motherboard in the factory maybe they were using an old batch of batteries I don't know so but on average you can expect no less than five years and it could last up to 10 years so that's that's the average if you happen to have a battery run flat on your motherboard which is very unlikely most likely your motherboard's gonna fail way way before the battery looks flat but if it does happen to you I would say just go and grab the battery from an old failed motherboard everyone on it always has a motherboard or two lying around with an old battery on it and that battery normally works so you just go and grab the battery from an old motherboard is now blown or broken or something in that regard and you go to your motherboard you take it out and you just put in your old battery of the battery from the broken motherboard and there you go so yeah we can say here it lost about five to ten years the powers this battery Powers the RTC which keeps track of the system date and time and it keeps track of your settings like the boot order of your computer so that's what it does naturally I probably didn't need to tell you guys that much but I like to go overboard because I know you guys need to write the exam and in the day I would really love it when you guys can actually pause this exam all right so speaking of passing the exam um there is a pbq in the exam about motherboards now if you don't know what pbq is that is short for Performance Based question in other words assimilation so if you guys plan on setting for the a plus exam there is two exams I'm sure most of you guys know that already you need to write both and pass both to earn the a plus certification there's not a specific order need to write them in there's not a specific order you need to pass them in with as long as you eventually pass both of them you'll ultimately get your A Plus certification and in this exams both of them the majority of your questions will be Theory questions the majority of them will be monkey puzzle questions which means you'll be presented with a question they'll give you four possible answers of which in most cases you can only choose one answer not all questions are like that though one of the kinds of questions you can also expect in the exam is a pbq performance based question which is also known as assimilation so where they'll actually physically have you do something in exam some of these pbqs are quite Advanced some of them are pretty straightforward so there's a pbq in the exam where they show you a motherboard a full-blown motherboard and you are going to be tossed with dragging the correct names to the correct components on the motherboard so that's basically it it's like a puzzle so they're going to show you guys a picture of a motherboard and you're gonna have to drag the correct name to the correct component on the motherboard so you can see in this picture in front of us it's a picture of the CMOS battery so they might have CMOS battery or coin cell battery or something unless there's an option on the left and you're gonna have to drag that name next to the coin cell battery onto the motherboard it's actually a very easy simulation it's almost impossible to get it wrong but I still want to mention it to you folks so you at least know that you should pay attention to where what is on the motherboard you do not need to know for this exam what socket CPU someone has what kind of ram they have no you just need to know where the ram goes you just need to know where the CPU goes with a pcie card goes in other words your graphics card where does the coin cell battery go that that kind of stuff if you can identify that on the motherboard in the exam you'll be Aces now speaking of identifying things on the motherboard so in this picture never mind the coin cell battery we can obviously see those graphics card slots and a couple other slots there which are known as expansion slots so let's move on to expansion slots it's a connection slot or slots on the motherboard now which adapter cards can be installed to extend the range of functions of the computer and what it can obviously go and perform so we've spoken about graphics cards if you go and put in a graphics card the chances are you might already have a built-in graphics card but when you go and put a graphs card in that means you're greatly enhancing the graphics capabilities of your machine so you can probably go and play Fancy games do some fancy rendering that kind of stuff and rendering is something I need mind you so of me making these huge a plus videos and stuff it's not always as easy easy as it seems it's not just about recording and editing these videos you need a graphics card to render these videos and let me tell you the bigger the video is the bigger and the fancier graph Squad needs to be to be able to to be able to render these videos it becomes nearly impossible to render a video as soon as it becomes more than an hour you know you need a gaming graphics card to be able to render these videos in now other kinds of expansion cards you get will probably be think is like network cards giving you additional Network capabilities TV cards and I don't think anyone's gonna get those anymore it might be a sound card it might be an internal modem the point is these expansion cards normally expand on the capabilities of your machine giving it additional capabilities so if I put in an external network card my machine can now go and connect to networks or additional networks if it already had a working built-in Network Port and all that kinds of stuff now you'll find that the average motherboard has multi-bus design which allows different expansion slots on a motherboard so you've got your pcie Express you know the E stands for Express which is multiply 16 so that's your graphics card you get your normal PCI slot you get your mini pcie slots so I would definitely encourage you guys to go to Google or some sort of website of your choice find a picture of a motherboard and go and check where is what on the motherboard just the basic stuff so where is the pcie slot where is the pce a PCI slot where's the mini pcie slots where's the jumper cables go whereas the Sata cable go plug-in where does the CPU go the ram slip slots go just go find a motherboard online go and check where does what go because there is a question exam about that where you're gonna have to go and drag and drop now I can't guarantee that you guys are going to get that question because at the end of the day the amount of questions you're going to get per exam is normally between 19 and 100 questions and the actual pool of possible questions is normally anywhere between 300 and a thousand even more so they will randomly take questions out of that pool so you might get questions you know that could be this motherboard you might not get the motherboard so maybe you're sitting at the exam with one of your colleagues or friends he or she gets it and you don't get it so but at least you know about it so that if you do get that question exam at least then you know how to go and answer it so yeah these there's a lot of slots on the motherboard these expansion slots some of them do allow you to actually support you know some of the older Technologies there so yeah because it's to give you additional capabilities folks now just to add on to this did you guys know what I'm talking about let me show you that bottom left of the motherboard again so there are the slots so you need to just basically be careful of those ones those are the ones the guys normally lose marks for in the exam because you get multiple PCI e-slots and multiple PCI slots so the one way at the top is your pcie slot that's your main graphics card slot you'll see they've got to multiply 16 there and then there's a PCI E multiply 8 there that is another graphics card slot which is a bit slower you get your PCI E1 there that's that small little one and then you get any other white slots that are good in this picture it's actually a black slot but you also get normal expansion slots which is PCI the normal PCI is normally for things like your TV network cards sound cards that's what those ones are for so if you do get this question exam my suggestion to you guys would be start the things you do know because most of these answers you'll find I think all of them actually you can only use them once so if you know where this CPU is drag the CPU name to the CPU if you know where the ram is drag the ram name to the RAM and eventually you're going to find you're only going to be left of like one or two you know if you only left with one or two possible answers and there's only one or two blank blocks you're able you'll be able to actually very easily identify which is which by the process of elimination ten to one one of the ones that the average person will be left with is pcie one and if you see the blank slot there then you'll know oh yeah that's the one that was pcie one so by process of elimination you can actually get all the answers right to this question exam folks alright so let's move a little bit to the bottom right again of this motherboard so like I said you could possibly find that coin cell battery the bottom right as well not that that's the topic right now anymore but you could possibly find it there so the moment we're focusing specifically on the SATA ports and the Legacy partaports so that is what your old IDE cables you know where they would go and plug in we call those Sparta cables we're actually going to cover that in the Legacy cable section so we're currently in the second main section of this module and on the third main section we're going to talk about Legacy cable types one of which is your old power cables also known as IDE cables we used to use those nozzle all hard drives and on our old Optical drives so if you had an old DVD ROM drive or an old CD-ROM drive that is what you would plug it into we would plug it in plug those devices into those old pathar cables it's a very wide cables now you're gonna have a very hard time if I'm being honest finding a motherboard it still has one of those ports motherboards these days do not have those ports if you find a port like that on the motherboard it's probably because it's a very old motherboard from 10 years or more ago you are not gonna find a motherboard with a slot like that they're extinct at this point in time on all the new motherboards so yeah we could go and use that for our old hard drives or we could go and use that for our old Optical drives one end would plug into the motherboard and the other end of the cable would have two connectors you can connect both connectors to a hard drive each so two hard drives or you can go and connect both connectors to an optical drive each in other words two Optical drives or you can go and connect one of those connectors to a to a hard drive and the other one to an optical drive it was really your choice how you want to go and mix and match those the average motherboard would normally have about two portal ports which means you can go and connect two cables which supports two devices each so in totally you can go and connect up to four devices if you had more than two IDE ports on the motherboard yeah that would probably be a fancy motherboard now looking at the sort of ports they've got there I see this motherboard actually has six sorter ports on average the average motherboard only have about two or four I think the average number will probably be about four that's probably the most universal number you'll find on the average motherboard so anything more than six other ports you should consider yourself very lucky since most motherboards only come out with four of those ports so you'll notice if you look into those little ports there you can only plug them in one way I would actually want to actually want to go as fast to say that these cables are made idiot proof you cannot plug them in the wrong way they're basically made idiot proof so yeah you can only plug them into those ports one way when it comes to the actual devices themselves this is once again going to be Optical drives and hard drives this is just connected now with the new cables instead and on the actual devices themselves they can only plug in one way as well nothing to worry about in that regard now still on the same bottom right corner of the motherboard now we're just going to look at the other connectors here at the bottom right of the motherboard the first thing I want to make clear just like the CMOS battery this is usually at the bottom right but it's not set in stone so if you look at the the the way at the bottom right there where it says front panel headers that is normally always going to be the bottom right the question is just where at the bottom right it might actually be at the bottom bottom like where it is right now or it could be slightly more up to where those satell connectors are if you look at those USB headers or audio headers those are normally at the bottom right where they are right now in some case you might find them at the bottom left on the motherboard the good news is all of these are always very clearly labeled on the motherboard now starting with the front panel headers at first glance it might actually look like two rows of pin of pins each of them having five pins each in other words 10 pins in total but if you look very closely you'll find it's not 10 pins it's not two rows or five pins each it is two rows of pins but one row has got five pins the other row is actually in fact only got four pins one of the pins is in fact missing that is just to help keep you track where you are and all that you'll find every two pins is normally color coded not always the case but on all the new motherboards these days that actually is the case two pins will be highlighted in Red so the bottom of those two pins you'll find on the plastic base it's gonna be colored in red two of them will be blue two of them will be yellow or orange and two of them was going to be green now next to the two Red Pins you'll find that they've written pwr which is short for power and next to the two blue ones you'll find pwr Space rst which is power reset you'll find next to the yellow ones or orange ones it normally says HDD space LED in other words hard drive LED light and then you'll find pwr Space LED next to the green one in most cases that's the power lights so starting of the red one which is probably the most important one out of the lot that is your power button folks so the power button in any system unit is not gonna work so when you go and buy a motherboard and you buy a case these two come separately the power button and the reset button and all those ports in the front of your case the audio jack the mic Jack all the fancy lights and stuff that comes with the case it's built in to the case now how does your machine know what to do when you press certain buttons in the front how does your machine know which likes to turn on when to turn them on and how to turn them on how it does that is because you are going to have to connect those lights and buttons to the motherboard which is what we're looking at right now so when it comes to the power button being the most important button it's got a very small little wire with a little plastic connector that needs to plug into two pins on that connector you'll find it's got written pwr in other words power and you need to slide that little connector over the two pins that says pwr which is normally highlighted in red now it's not a specific order it's not a one size fits all and all motherboard some motherboards the two first pins might be red on the next motherboard my 32nd two pins I don't know it varies from motherboard's motherboard make to make and model to model so you're gonna have to go and check the motherboard and check the connector you might also be lucky and you'll find the connectors the actual ones are coming from the case the wires are actually also color coded it might be red they might be green and orange and blue and red really just makes it so much quicker and so much easier to actually go and connect this it might sound like rocket science but guys I tell you honestly the more you do this the quicker you're gonna see it actually it is actually very easy it's just muscle memory so after a couple of times of doing this you're going to do this you're not even going to think about it yeah getting back to the connectors you're going to go and connect the one that says pwr to the two Red Pins that says to pwr the blue wire if you're lucky enough to have it blue the connector will say pwr space rst so reset the button in the front if you're lucky enough to have one okay that you're gonna slide over the two blue pins on the motherboard which will say pwr rst then the lights in the front of the case now you actually don't need to connect the lights up the light is just to show an indication of what's going on in the machine to make the box look nice and fancy but in reality if you didn't hook up the lights nothing's gonna happen it's just the case is going to be dead you're not going to see any lights that's it so HDD space LED is the hard drive light so you'll find somebody all the boxes have one little small little light in the front it's normally either orange or green it's normally off and if you're very busy or active on a harder I've been installing something uninstalling something copying something on a hard drive that light will start flickering the more active you are on a hard drive the more the light will start flickering the more rapid it will start flickering or even stay on at some point it's got no real purpose besides showing you the hard drive is active and that you can actually see your task manager as well so I find that one to be redundant then you've got the pwr space LED power lights so if you've got a gaming case then yes you're probably going to want to plug that one in otherwise you're not going to see any of those fancy lights if it's a normal office PC you know what you might as well leave it out because there's only like one little light in the Box it's probably going to be in the power button you might not even be so lucky to have a light so that one's kind of redundant in the normal office PC but when it comes to these fancy gaming cases some of us got they normally come with all kinds of cool little lights in the case and all that that is where you plug that in folks so the pwr space LED needs to plug into the green pins it's gonna say case lights or pwr LED something in that regard is what it's going to say now since we've spoken about saw tar cables and SATA ports although we didn't actually talk about solar cables per se but we did talk about the ports here is an example of a SATA hard drive folks so you can see here is where you would plug in the red cable so the one on the right is where you plug in your data cable data data depending on which country you're from you might pronounce that differently that is where you'll plug that little doohickey in on the left is where you're gonna go and plug in the power connector if you look at its first launch you'll see they actually look the same it's just the length of them that's slightly different but once again you can only plug them in one way you cannot plug in the power cable wrong you cannot plug in the data cable wrong it's impossible to do so so yeah that's what I saw the hard drive looks like IDE hard drives look slightly different I'll show you guys a picture of that a little bit later in the Legacy cable section once we start talking about those cables now speaking of cables let me show you guys these kinds of cables Network connector types so the average laptop the average desktop the average server and what have you would have that Port that says RJ45 on the lift that's your normal Lan cable connector so if you go check your motherboard or let me go and put it in simple terms if you go check your your laptop on the side of your laptop well not all laptops but the majority of laptops will have that little Portage you guys see there that is where you would normally go and plug in into cable almost all desktop Pieces come out of those as well that Port is an RJ45 Port the cable on the right that little connector that it has got on it which is a transparent connector that is an RJ45 connector it doesn't matter what kind of network cable you're using you know what kind of category it is and what kind of speed it is it will always be an RJ45 connector if you look at the cable on the right at first loss it might look like the same but if you look very closely you'll see that that Port only has four copper pins and the one on the left has got eight copper pins the one on the left we will always use all eight of those pins and we will always use all eight wires that's within that cable if you look at the right we do not necessarily use all four pins most of the cables I've dealt with only use two or three of those pins but if you want to you can go use all fill pins it depends on how many phones you've got in your offers how they're connected and configured and all that kind of stuff now I kind of gave away the answer so that cable is used for telephones folks so those good old-fashioned all telephones used to find your grandma's house those old landlines that is the cable you'd plug into those phones the connector is an rj11 connector the port is an rj11 Port these cables are also known as pots plane or telephone service or plan or telephone system so it basically comes down to the same thing thing so yeah guys remember what pod stands for Port stands for plain old telephone system or service and that is definitely going to be a question exam they're going to ask you which of the following cables uses an rj11 connector or an rj11 Port they're probably going to say connector and one of the possible answers they might present you of an exam is pots and people are like no it's not that one because they don't even know what pot stands for pots is plain old telephone service or system you know some people call it server some people call it server system potato potato as long as you know what it is it's the old cables that we used to use on the old telephones that is probably going to be your answer folks now speaking of network cards all of that let me just bring you guys quickly back to expansion cards I know we covered this we covered this earlier I want to specifically show you guys this expansion card and network card now first of all please ignore the ports on red in the chord I see this one has got two RJ45 ports on average realistically they'll normally come out only with one port now yes you do get native cards that do in fact come out of two RJ45 ports but they're quite rare it's normally only going to be one so at first last this actually looks like an old internal modem because those actually used to have two ports and there used to be two rj11 ports one with plug into your modem and the other one would plug into well your PC and all that you know that kind of stuff so yeah what is your network card it is known as a network interface card as the full official name network interface card the short abbreviation to that would be Nick so you'll find an ID and the exams and the manuals and the slideshows and the courses everywhere everyone always refers to it as a Nick so the next time you hear someone talk about the Nick we're talking about your network cards folks now every network interface card has a physical address embedded into it that is known as your Mac you can think of it as your social security number or your ID number depending on which country you're from it's Unique identifier which we identify that card with so if you're going to go online you're gonna go get up to some sort of shenanigans we can actually Trace you or identify you using your Mac we also use that Mac to do full thing on networks so if only certain people of certain devices are allowed to access certain resources we can go and put a filter on the network we will only allow certain Mac addresses and when you go and connect with a certain device to that network if it's not one of those allowed Mac addresses you're not going to be able to gain access to those resources so it's a very cool function you're going to have and I think they always tell you that you cannot change the MAC address but which is not actually true I mean if you go take out the native card and you put a different one in that's one way to change the network address or the MAC address you cannot choose a VIN but you can at least change it then there are quite a few other ways where you can go and spoof a mac address the term spoof means you're going to go in 4 or something and in this case we're going to go and Forge a MAC address so there are ways to go and do that but that's not the topic at hand here right now so we're going to focus on this module today now speaking of focusing on this module that brings us to the end of the second section in this module and it brings us to the third main section and the last main section is module which is Legacy cable types now first of all I would like to point out the word legacy means something is old I've seen a lot of people don't actually know what that means so whenever we say Legacy in it we're referring to Old Hardware Old software old operating system something that we no longer use something very old so if we talk about Legacy cables I actually mean very old kinds of cables we used to use an I.T which we hardly use or never use anymore if I were to say Legacy software I would be referring to some old software we used to use back in the day which we no longer use so yeah whenever we say Legacy guys that's what we're talking about now the first kind of Legacy cable I want to bring your attention to is integrated Drive Electronics interface wow try saying that five times fast so that is an IDE cable also known as Potter so although we spoke about SATA the SATA cables those are the ones we use on our new modern hard drives and new modern Optical drives not that anyone's going to be using an optical drive these days the ones you're seeing right in front of you that used to be known as the Pata cables nobody actually called it a portal cable though we used to always just call this an IDE cable now most commonly they were in that color and it only had like a little pink or little red connector on the side as you guys can see there's a little pink line on this picture there for the for the cable but they don't have to be you know white just like the Sata cable which I told you guys a little could be red pink yellow any colored rainbow these Potter cables also came forth on any color of the rainbow they were just most commonly in White and the solder ones are just most commonly in red but it's not set in stone those colors now why is there a pink line on this cable that line could also be any color the rainbow the point is is to distinguish which pin is pin number one so if you if you were to go on plug this connector into your motherboard the colored the colored side of it that little pink strip needs to be facing outwards towards you pin one always faces towards you you didn't have to worry about you can actually only plug this thing in one way under the motherboard normally has one of those pins blocked on the little connector so you could not plug it in wrong in the motherboard even if you tried it's just to help you along so as you can see we started switch a lot quicker if you need to go and struggle in a dock or whatever the case might be or if you're in a rush so it doesn't really have me even if they remove that color strip it wouldn't have a train smash reaction to it it's just there to make your life a little bit easier now as for where do we plug this into the motherboard there's a picture for you guys so you can see what it used to look like on the motherboard some motherboards used to have only one port some had two or three or four the average number was about two of those ports in the average motherboard one will be ide1 the other one would be known as ide2 as I've said earlier you'd connect one end of a cable into one of those ports on the motherboard and then the cable itself would have two connectors like you saw in the previous picture one of those connects you can connect to a hard drive the other you can go and connect your optical drive or both your hard drives or both to Optical drives it was really your choice based on your unique requirements back in the day now as for the actual Hall that I've used to plug into there is a picture of you guys of what that used to look like you can see that looks very different compared to the earlier saw the hard drive I showed you folks so the bottom left of that picture is we would go and plug in an IDE cable at the bottom right is we're going to plug in your power cable the Molex connector we spoke off earlier do you remember those mollix characters I spoke of if you're wondering what the heck are those pins between the data cable and the power cable that folks is the jumpers now that is something you guys luckily don't have to struggle with all the new hard drives don't have that anymore but back in the day depending on what make hard drive you had what size hard drive you had and how many hard drives you had and when you had optical drives or not you might have had to go and put in jumpers there so it's a little plastic connector you have to go and put over two of those pins and that's basically gonna allow you to go and choose which hard drive is the main one which is the secondary um that kinds of stuff not something you guys need to worry about basically came down to master and slave so if you had one hard drive or multiple hard drives one hard drive your main hard drive will be seen as master all the other hard drives will be seen as slave if you had a hard drive an optical drive on the same cable the hard drive would only be seen as master and optical drive will be seen as slave she had to go and choose you know put a pin in or put it on a certain connector or not put a pin in at all depending on what kind of devices you have and what configuration you had what kind of brand of hard drive you have there was a lot of things but normally on the sticker on the hard drive with the indicates I don't know if you guys can see it there so on a sticker we can't read it properly but you can actually see there's actually a picture of the pins and I'll show you where the connector needs to go depending on what kind of configuration you've got in that specific machine now moving on of the topic of Legacy here we've got serial cables now you're gonna have a very hard time finding these but they are still out there we still use them to a certain extent and server rooms not a topic actually in this course so back in the day I would say 15 20 years or more ago we used to have motherboards that actually had ports for these kinds of cables your laptop your desktop used to have this port it used to be called your serial Port also known as your com port so this is also known as rs-232 so the RS stands for recommended standard number 232 interface so that's one of its names it also goes by DB9 connector now the one we have in front of us is in fact a DB9 connector if you were to go and count those little holes in that little connect today you would find there's nine of them it's a DB9 connector it's also known as a com Port so and then where do we always where did we go and use this vote so many many moons ago 20 years 30 years ago we used to use these cables for things like modems dial-up modems to be precise we used to use them for our old PS2 keyboards and mouses all kinds of weird very old technology now we definitely don't use these cables for our mouses and keyboards we definitely don't even use dial up modems anymore so yeah the cables for the most part extinct where you might possibly see them still though isn't a server environment like did you not there are certain devices in the server room that requires you to go and connect to them using a console cable so the point that the side of the cable that plugs into the actual device in a server room looks like a land cable connector it actually is an RJ45 but it's not a lan cable the other end of that cable looks like this a Serial cable and the idea is you're supposed to plug that into your laptop or your desktop so you can go and manage that component in a server room now how the heck do you do that do you have the new modern laptops and desktops it's probably going to be a laptop and a server info so we normally get a little converter that converts that serial to something like a USB so we convert 0 to USB plug it into the laptop's USB port and then we plug the other end of that cable into the console Port which looks like a normal Lan cable port on that device that switch that router that file or whatever it might be and we do the configuration from the laptop remotely and then folks we've got this kind of cable small computer system interface wow I haven't said that in years I can't remember the last time I said that we normally always call this a scuzzy cable so we use this on scuzzy drives you know scuzzy hard drives in most cases so first of all the first thing you need to know about this is this interface is absolute we do not use them anymore for the most part they are extinct I suppose you might still find them in some very rare situations in some companies where they just might not be able to replace that Legacy system so that's normally a very good reason for it so maybe there's a company out there there's probably more than one company out there they've got a very old Legacy system which means old it's a very old system and this very old system might have some bespoken applications on it which they cannot go and swap out so it's a very very old system it's got a couple of applications running on it bespoke basically means custom applications it's got applications on that system which were custom made for that company or that organization these applications cannot be transferred to a new system but the company still needs those applications since they were custom made they probably paid a pretty penny for them back in the day maybe they do not have the money to go and get new ones maybe there is not a way to get new ones maybe there's nobody that that knows how to go and make a new one it could be very good reason behind it the point is they could possibly have something on the old systems like old bespoken applications which they are not gonna go on transport you new system because it's just too risky and if that's the case then they might still be running the scuzzy hard drives and viscosity cables and all that the problem of that though is if God forbid something happens to those those systems one day you can have a very hard time finding any spare parts if it's spare parts you're gonna need so all you can do for is just hope something doesn't happen to those systems all right so let's talk about adapter cables so you get passive cables of different connectors on each end kind of like the one I spoke of earlier where it has got a console cable connector on the one end and a Serial cable connector on the other end the serial connector part is supposed to connect your laptop not that it's got a port for it and the console cable connector Port you're supposed to plug into the system in the server room so that is a passive cable when you get active cables with circuitry to translate signaling between different interface types now this converter or adapter is sometimes a little converted a physical converter that can fit into the palm of your hand it can convert one signal to another like VGA to DVI VGA to HDMI DVI to HDMI you know any kind of thing like that or it could just be a small little cable that adapts from one converter to another it can convert one kind of port to another kind of Port now speaking of ports let's talk about video so video is probably one of the most common kinds of converters you guys can get or the common kinds of adapters you're going to get so it's video it could be something like HDMI to VGA HDMI to DisplayPort HDMI to DVI you'll notice I'm just writing HDMI there because let's face almost everything works with HDMI nowadays and HDMI is the new standard so to speak VGA is old analog we don't really use that anymore it's an old analog although a lot of monitor still supports that DisplayPort is the new replacement for HDMI because it's got no royalties and DVI was a replacement originally for VGA but DVI is even being phased out to a certain degree now then you also get USB connectors mind you you could use BC to USB a um and heck it could also be USB hubs so if it's a USB hub you can go and plug something into a USB port and it effectively splits that USB port into more ports it gives you four ports or eight ports I think the most common number I've seen is four ports so maybe your laptop or desktop has very limited ports maybe it's only two USB ports you plug one of those adapters into one of those USB ports so you're basically sacrificing one of your ports in your laptop or desktop and that in turn gives you four extra ones pretty nifty right then you also have USB to Thunderbolt and USB to lightning so essentially what I'm saying is you get so freaking mini adapter cables and connectors it is just insane there is something out there for everyone and for everything all you need to go and do is just look now looking in the store itself might be very hard so I find it's personally a lot easier just to go online we're gonna search for what I'm what I'm looking for and if I find that it's available then I'll go into store because maybe what you're searching for doesn't exist although these days anything and everything does exist well folks that brings us to the end of module one of the full CompTIA a plus course remember I said there's going to be 20 modules so there's going to be 20 rather long videos this one being the first one some might be quite long some might be shorter depending on what's actually being covered in that specific module so yeah guys if you are brand new to the channel remember to subscribe and hit that like button otherwise you might next miss the next modules and before you guys disappear on me just a special shout out to the sponsors of this channel so I've got a couple of patreon and PayPal sponsors so there you guys can see them very very very very thank you to the patreon sponsors the PayPal sponsors I've appreciated very much and if you guys would also like to support the channel you can do that by hitting that thanks button below the video or you can become a patreon or you can become a PayPal sponsor or you can find a couple other sponsor links in the video description down below I mean heck you can even go buy me a coffee or a milkshake but if I'm being perfectly honest at 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