PC Hardware A Beginner’s Guide

(^16) PC Hardware: A Beginner’s Guide
The items in Figure 1-12 correspond to the following:

The monitor, which is also called the display, the visual display unit (VDU),
or the screen
 The keyboard
 The system unit, which contains the motherboard, disk drives, expansion
cards, and input/output ports
 The mouse
The deskto pcom puter in Figure 1-12, where the monitor sits on to pof the system unit,
is a very common configuration for personal computers. Other popular PC configurations
are the tower and minitower computers, in which the system units sits on the floor or other
surface and the monitor sits separately on a desktop or wherever. Figure 1-13 shows a
tower-style computer.
Computers also come in small packages. The notebook computer (see Figure 1-14)
has made power-computing very portable. The pocket-sized palmtop computer, such as
the Casio Cassiopia (Figure 1-15), and the personal digital assistant (PDA), such as the
3Com Palm Pilot or the Mindspring Visor (see Figure 1-16), has the ability to perform
many personal productivity applications.
Figure 1-13. A personal computer with a tower case. Photo courtesy of IBM Corporation