Glossary

Guide

Term

User

PCMCIA

Notebook

Pixel

Sony

 

 

Port replicator

Processor

Product recovery CD-ROM

PS/2

PSTN

RAM

n N

109

Definition

PCMCIA (Personal Computer Memory Card International Association) is the name of the group that produced the specification for the credit card-sized plug-in boards for laptop computers. The cards used to be called PCMCIA cards, but as this was rather unpronounceable, these cards are now termed PC cards. An example of a PC card is a credit card-sized modem.

A pixel (Picture Element) is a part of your screen. Your screen is made up of thousands of pixels, enabling you to see colours and pictures on it. The more pixels, the higher the resolution and the better the image quality.

An additional device that you can connect to your notebook. The port replicator contains ports that enable you to connect additional peripherals (such as a printer or a monitor) to your VAIO. A port replicator is similar to a docking station, but does not include additional slots for adding expansion boards or storage devices.

The processor is the brains of the computer; it processes the instructions of your system’s programs. The processor is also known as the CPU or microprocessor and can be found on the motherboard (see this word) of your computer.

The product recovery CD-ROMs include the application recovery CD-ROM and the system recovery CD-ROM(s).

A type of mouse or keyboard port.

PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) refers to the plain old telephone service, the national telecommunication networks implementing voice transmission by using analog signals.

Short for Random Access Memory, the memory used to run programs and store data in current use. RAM is the fastest kind of memory to read from and write to. Information stored in RAM is lost when you turn off the computer. The higher the RAM capacity, the faster your current data can be processed.