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questions?
Can somebody tell me what is a processor, RAM, and all the good stuff because I want too use my computer as a gaming computer, but, I don't know all that stuff or how to identify problems in my computer. Also, I have 2 hard drives, a C drive and a D drive, I am pretty concerned with the space on my C drive as I have 97.6GBotal Space with 67.4GB free Space left, and a D drive with 368GB total and 353GB free space left. How can I make my D drive (368GB) the main hard drive because the C drive is labled as Local Disk (Main) while the D drive is labled as Local Disk (Extra Storage). My brother installed the D drive about 6 months ago and I'm wondering how he did it and stuff like that. Thanks -Justin.
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I'm going to give you a little primer, but realize that you have a long way to go.
Let's start with the hard drive space problem. You have plenty of free space on your C drive. You do need to keep some free space for stuff, but 67.4G is plenty. Most people say to keep around 10% free, so for your C Drive, with 97.6G of total space, you need to keep about 9.7G free. So you have plenty of room there. In terms of MMO's, World of Warcraft takes up about 30G if you have every expansion. So, plenty of room.
The reason your brother made it the C (Main) drive, is probably because it's faster than the D drive. And you want your fastest drive to be your Main drive, even if it doesn't have as much space.
Now, to talk about all that "good stuff"
The CPU (Central Processing Unit), or processor, is the main brains of a computer. It's what adds/divides/multiples/subtracts all the ones and zeros. A CPU operates on a clock: each tick of the clock, it can do one operation. One operation is like... add two numbers, or move a number into memory, or see if one number is larger than another. So in general, the faster the clock, the more operations the CPU can do in a given amount of time. There are other things that can make CPU's faster (like some special instructions that can add two numbers and do the dot cross product all in one clock cycle), but all other things equal, a CPU with a faster clock will be faster than one with a slower clock. Clocks are measured in Hertz (Hz). Hertz is the same as "per Second", so when a CPU says it's 3.0 Gigahertz, Giga means "Billion", so that's 3.0 Billion operations per second.
CPU's also come with cores these days. A core is essentially a single CPU. A Dual Core CPU has 2 CPU's on the same chip. A Quad-Core, has 4. A quad core CPU can do 4 operations at the same time. A Quad core won't be exactly 4x faster than a single core, because the software has to be specially written to take advantage of cores (most software is written to run on a single core at a time), but in general, most systems today are dual or quad core, and most gaming computers that I see recommended today are quad cores.
Memory is called RAM (Random Access Memory), and this is short term memory. If you turn off the computer, the RAM gets erased, so it's called "volatile" storage, because it isn't permanent. A program has to get reloaded into RAM every time you run it. RAM comes on DIMMS (Dual Inline Memory Module), and these are pretty fast. Usually they are measured in Gigabytes (billions of bytes), and most systems today have 2, 4, or sometimes 8G of RAM. There is a lot more about RAM, but the most important thing about it is how much you have.
You already know a bit about your hard drives. These are permanent storage: you turn off the computer, the data stays put (called nonvolatile). This is the long term memory on your computer, and is also typically measured in Gigabytes, although it is much much cheaper per Gigabyte than RAM memory - this is why you have 97G on your C drive, and 368G on your D drive. It is also much much slower. Any data on the hard drive has to be loaded into the RAM before the CPU can do anything with it. A CPU cannot directly do anything to data on a hard drive, other than move it to and from the RAM.
The Video card is one of the most important parts of a gaming computer, and what I would call "the good stuff". The only thing a video card does, is calculate graphics. They have special instructions specifically for making 2D and 3D graphics go really really fast. A video card can have more impact on a video game than even the CPU.
And the only other big component in your computer is the power supply. It may have a boring job, but it's very important. All it does is convert the voltage from your wall socket into usable power for the computer parts. But without it, nothing else works. It's not the fanciest part of a computer, but it's one of the most important.
Before you go ripping into that computer and trying to do extreme overclocking and hard drive swapping, I would check with your brother, he can probably show you a thing or two right there.
A hard drive that Windows recognizes as 97.6 GB would be strange. Are you sure that isn't a single 500 GB physical hard drive broken into two partitions?
My friend had the same exact question, then I gave him my Disk Drive name, ST3500418AS...
and showed me this
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=c501895c8ccce110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD
Thanks Ridelynn and Quizzical!