Computer Hardware and Software Questions and Answers

Answer: B

Correct answer: printhead pins

The pins fire through a lubricant-free guide and are cooled by airflow; oil on them collects paper dust and jams them. The rails and bearings are the parts that do need lubrication.

Answer: B

Correct answer: 16 Ohms

A small computer speaker is a coil of wire and reads its nominal impedance - typically 16 ohms - on a resistance range. A reading of zero would mean a short and an infinite reading an open coil.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Solid-state drive

A solid-state drive is secondary storage: non-volatile, large, and not directly addressable by the processor - its contents must be copied into main memory before they can be used. The other three are all primary storage, directly accessible by the CPU. Registers sit inside the processor, cache sits beside it, and RAM is the main memory. All three are volatile. The distinction is between what the processor can address directly and what it cannot. Secondary storage includes hard disks, SSDs, USB flash drives, memory cards and optical discs; tertiary storage covers tape and archival media, slower still. An SSD differs from a hard disk in having no moving parts: it stores data in flash memory rather than on spinning magnetic platters, so it is far faster at random access, silent, and resistant to shock. Its limitation is a finite number of write cycles per cell, which wear-levelling algorithms spread across the drive.

Answer: D

Correct answer: 40

The IDE ribbon cable has 40 pins; the 80-conductor cable used for the faster modes still has 40 pins, the extra wires being grounds.

Answer: B

Correct answer: In the phone line

Carrier detect is the modem's report that it can hear the far end. A modem known to be good that sees no carrier is being told, correctly, that nothing is arriving - so the fault is on the line.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Expansion board

Static discharge damages semiconductors, and an expansion board is dense with them and handled directly. A power supply, monitor and keyboard are all far more robust.

Answer: D

Correct answer: verify the link status on the computer's network card

The link light shows whether there is a working connection to the switch at all. If it is dark, no amount of driver or protocol work will help, so it is checked before anything in software.

Answer: C

Correct answer: 0.0

A good fuse is a piece of wire, so its resistance is effectively zero and the meter reads 0.0. Its current rating has no bearing on the resistance reading.

Answer: B

Correct answer: 3

COM1 and COM3 share IRQ4; COM2 and COM4 share IRQ3. That sharing is why two devices on the even-numbered ports conflict.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Replacing the ribbon

Patchy, faint or uneven print on a dot matrix printer means the ribbon is worn or is no longer advancing evenly over its whole width. Replacing it is the first and usually the only step.