UPGRADING REPAIRING PCs

Glossary of Essential Terms 9
Table 1.3 Terms and Their Definitions Continued
Term Definition
PostScript Adobe’s sophisticated printer language used in laser and inkjet printers
designed for graphic arts professionals.
QIC Quarter-Inch Committee; the standards body responsible for most
tape drive standards used by PC clients and small network servers.
QIC-EX Extra-capacity cartridges developed for some QIC, QIC-Wide, and
Travan drives by Verbatim.
Register size Number of bits of data the CPU can process in a single operation.
Resolution Combination of horizontal and vertical pixels in an image; larger monitors
support higher resolutions.
ROM BIOS Read-only memory BIOS; older BIOS chips that were socketed and
could be updated only by being physically replaced.
RS-232 Diverse serial port standard with many different device-specific
pinouts; supports both 9-pin and 25-pin ports.
Scan codes Hexadecimal codes transmitted by the keyboard when keys are struck;
must be converted to ASCII for display onscreen.
SCSI Small computer system interface; a family of high-performance interfaces
used on high-speed hard drives, optical drives, scanners, and
other internal and external devices. Each device must have a unique ID
number.
SIMM Single Inline Memory Module; common type of memory device from
late 1980s to mid-1990s; can have 30 or 72 edge connectors.
SmartMedia A type of flash memory device.
SoundBlaster Creative Labs’ longtime family of sound cards; the de facto standard
for DOS-based audio.
TCP/IP Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol; the protocol of the
World Wide Web and the Internet.
Travan A family of tape drives and media developed from QIC and QIC-Wide
standards by Imation (originally 3M).
UART Universal Asynchronous Receive/Transmit chip; the heart of a serial
port or hardware-based modem.
UDMA Ultra DMA; a series of IDE data transfer rates that use DMA for even
faster performance. Most effective when combined with bus-mastering
hard disk host adapter driver software.
USB Universal Serial Bus; a high-speed, hub-based interface for pointing,
printing, and scanning devices.
UTP Unshielded twisted-pair cable, such as Category 5 used with 10/100
Ethernet.
v.90 Current 56Kbps high-speed, dial-up modem standard; replaced x2 and
K56flex.
v.92 New version of v.90 due in late 2000; supports call waiting and faster
uploading.
VESA Video Electronic Standards Association; trade group of monitor and
video card makers that develops various display and power management
standards.
VGA Video graphics adapter; a family of analog display standards that support
16 or more colors and 640×480 or higher resolutions.