Computer Hardware and Software Questions and Answers

Answer: B

Correct answer: True

The statement is true. A dot matrix printer forms characters by striking an inked ribbon against the paper with a column of pins, so it makes physical contact - the definition of an impact printer. Its virtues follow from that contact. It can print carbon copies in one pass, which is why it survives for railway tickets, invoices and continuous stationery long after other technologies displaced it. It is also cheap to run and tolerant of poor paper. Its drawbacks are noise and low print quality. Other impact printers are the daisy wheel, line printer and drum printer. Non-impact printers make no contact and are quieter and faster: an inkjet sprays droplets of ink and gives good colour cheaply, with the cartridges rather than the printer being the real cost; a laser printer uses a laser to write a charge pattern on a drum which attracts toner, then fuses it with heat, giving fast, sharp and economical output for volume work.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Pixels

Resolution is the number of pixels a display shows, quoted as width by height - 1920 × 1080 for Full HD, 3840 × 2160 for 4K. A pixel is the smallest addressable point of the image. The distractors each measure something else about a monitor, and the set is worth keeping apart. Hertz measures the refresh rate, how many times a second the image is redrawn - 60 Hz is standard and higher rates give smoother motion. Inches measure the screen size, taken diagonally. Bytes measure data, not display. What actually determines sharpness is neither resolution nor size alone but pixel density, in pixels per inch: the same 1920 × 1080 looks crisp on a 15-inch laptop and coarse on a 32-inch monitor. Aspect ratio is the shape, 16:9 being usual, and response time in milliseconds is how quickly a pixel changes, which matters for fast-moving images.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Non-abrasive cleanser

An LCD's Mylar coating is soft and is attacked by ammonia and by alcohol, both of which cloud it permanently. Only a mild non-abrasive cleaner on a soft cloth is safe.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Incorrect CMOS settings

The BIOS reads the drive's geometry and mode from CMOS, so wrong settings there make a perfectly good disk unreadable and produce a fixed disk error. Bad RAM and a slow processor give quite different symptoms.

Answer: B

Correct answer: A wrist strap

A wrist strap keeps the technician at the potential of the equipment, so no discharge can occur. De-ionizing fans help in a manufacturing area but do nothing for the person handling the board, and rubber gloves prevent the charge escaping at all.

Answer: B

Correct answer: SCSI host adapter

A SCSI host adapter both sends commands and data to its devices and receives data back, so it works in both directions. A video board only outputs, and the CPU is not a peripheral device at all.

Answer: B

Correct answer: serial

A COM port is a communications, or serial, port - it sends one bit at a time. The parallel port is LPT.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Floppy drive

IRQ6 belongs to the floppy disk controller; the keyboard uses IRQ1 and video cards normally use no interrupt at all.

Answer: B

Correct answer: D

Drive letters are assigned to all primary partitions first, in drive order, and only then to logical drives in the extended partitions. So the first drive's primary is C and the second drive's primary is D.

Answer: A

Correct answer: IEEE 1394 is faster

FireWire ran at 400 Mbps when USB 1.1 ran at 12, which is the difference that mattered for video capture. Both are plug and play and both are hot swappable, so those cannot be what separates them.