Computer Hardware and Software Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Correct answer: The image is transferred from the drum to the paper

At the transfer stage the transfer corona puts a strong positive charge on the paper, which pulls the negatively charged toner off the drum and onto the page. The laser has already done its work at the writing stage; fusing comes next.

Answer: B

Correct answer: handshaking

Handshaking is the exchange by which two modems agree on speed, modulation, error correction and compression before any data passes - the sequence of tones heard at the start of a call.

Answer: A

Correct answer: True

Resistance is measured in ohms, named after Georg Ohm and written with the Greek capital omega.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Make sure the printer is on line

A printer with power but no output is most often simply off line, which takes a moment to check and needs no parts. Replacing a fuse or a ribbon addresses faults whose symptoms are different.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Mass storage device

ATAPI - the AT Attachment Packet Interface - extends IDE beyond hard disks to other mass storage devices such as CD-ROM and tape drives, by carrying SCSI-style command packets over the IDE cable.

Answer: B

Correct answer: A software problem

The bomb dialog is the classic Macintosh system error, raised when a program does something the system cannot recover from. It reports a software failure; hardware faults are reported differently, by the startup chimes.

Answer: C

Correct answer: farads

Capacitance is measured in farads, though practical capacitors are rated in microfarads and picofarads.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Their protective sleeves

A 5¼ inch diskette has an exposed media window, so the sleeve is what keeps dust and fingerprints off the recording surface.

Answer: A

Correct answer: UPS

Only a UPS keeps the machine running through an interruption, so that data in memory is written out and the system shut down properly. A surge protector guards against excess voltage but supplies nothing when the mains fails.

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.