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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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EXAM TIP In the past it was common to accidentally “use” a touchpad

with your palm while typing, so you may find some devices with a hardware

switch or fn key combination for disabling the touchpad. More recent

touchpads are usually capable of detecting and ignoring accidental input like

this on their own.

Continuing the trend of mobile’s influence on more traditional portables, a

growing number of laptops now come equipped with a touchscreen like you

would find on a smartphone or tablet, again relying heavily on gestures to

enable users to fluidly perform complex actions. In some cases these are

otherwise very traditional laptops that happen to include a touchscreen, but in

other cases they are devices that are intended to be used as both a tablet and a

laptop. We’ll take a closer look at touchscreens when we discuss mobile

devices in Chapter 24.

Webcams and Microphones

The ability to communicate with others through real-time video is such a

common expectation of mobile and portable devices these days that most of

these devices (including laptops) come equipped with some sort of frontfacing

video camera—a webcam in the case of laptops—and one or more

built-in microphones. A single microphone may be suitable for picking up the

user’s voice, and additional microphones can help noise-cancellation routines

improve the audio quality.

Even though most of us may just use the microphone in conjunction with

the webcam, a growing number of programs support voice commands. Take

Microsoft, for example, which promotes its Cortana functionality built into

Windows 10. Any Windows 10 user on a system with a microphone, as long

as they can live with letting Windows listen in on them, can perform voice

searches and other actions from anywhere within earshot (mic-shot?) of their

device.

The downside of these input devices becoming ubiquitous is the security

risk they pose. It might be bad enough if a nefarious hacker or government

agency (from any country . . .) managed to get malware into my computer to

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