Computer Hardware

Computer hardware is the collection of physical elements of computer system. It  refers to the physical parts of a computer such as Monitor, Mouse, keyboard, computer data storage, hard drive disk (HDD), system unit (graphic cards, sound cards, memory, motherboard and chips), etc.

A typical computer (Personal Computer, PC) contains in a desktop or tower case the following parts:

• Motherboard which holds the CPU, main memory and other parts, and has slots for expansion cards
• power supply - a case that holds a transformer, voltage control and fan
• storage controllers, of IDE, SCSI or other type, that control hard disk , floppy disk, CD-ROM and other drives; the controllers sit directly on the motherboard (on-board) or on expansion cards
• graphics controller that produces the output for the monitor
• the hard disk, floppy disk and other drives for mass storage
• interface controllers (parallel, serial, USB, Firewire) to connect the computer to external peripheral devices such as printers or scanners