Fahrenheit — A temperature measurement system where 32° is the freezing point and 212° is the boiling point of water.
FCC — Federal Communications Commission — A U.S. agency responsible for enforcing
floppy drive — A disk drive that can read and write to floppy disks.
folder — A term used to describe space on a disk or drive where files are organized and grouped. Files in a folder can be viewed and ordered in various ways, such as alphabetically, by date, and by size.
format — The process that prepares a drive or disk for file storage. When a drive or disk is formatted, the existing information on it is lost.
FSB — front side bus — The data path and physical interface between the microprocessor and RAM.
FTP — file transfer protocol — A standard Internet protocol used to exchange files between computers connected to the Internet.
G
G — gravity — A measurement of weight and force.
GB — gigabyte — A measurement of data storage that equals 1024 MB (1,073,741,824 bytes). When used to refer to hard drive storage, the term is often rounded to 1,000,000,000 bytes.
GHz — gigahertz — A measurement of frequency that equals one thousand million Hz, or one thousand MHz. The speeds for computer microprocessors, buses, and interfaces are often measured in GHz.
graphics mode — A video mode that can be defined as x horizontal pixels by y vertical pixels by z colors. Graphics modes can display an unlimited variety of shapes and fonts.
GUI — graphical user interface — Software that interacts with the user by means of menus, windows, and icons. Most programs that operate on the Windows operating systems are GUIs.
H
hard drive — A drive that reads and writes data on a hard disk. The terms hard drive and hard disk are often used interchangeably.
heat sink — A metal plate on some microprocessors that helps dissipate heat.
help file — A file that contains descriptive or instructional information about a product. Some help files are associated with a particular program, such as Help in Microsoft Word. Other help files function as
hibernate mode — A power management mode that saves everything in memory to a reserved space on the hard drive and then turns off the computer. When you restart the computer, the memory information that was saved to the hard drive is automatically restored.
HTML — hypertext markup language — A set of codes inserted into an Internet web page intended for display on an Internet browser.
