Inside the PC

- For those of you who have never opened a system unit before, it can almost sometimes feel kinda like heart surgery because there's a lot of parts in there. And a way it is little bit like heart surgery because you really are going into the inner workings of the computer itself. Now normally this a place we would wanna be very careful. In particular, I should be wearing an anti-ESD wrist strap and be using anti-ESD procedures, but for right now on a demo system, and because I'm very, very careful we're gonna skip that one little part. So how do you open a case? Well the challenge here is that there is no standard way to open a case.

Every case is different in one way or another. So it's always funny when they see Mike Myers great computer PC technician, and I walk up to yet another case and I have no idea how to open it. The people are like, "you really know how to work on computers?" I'm like, "yeah, I swear I do. I just don't know where to open the case." But on this one, since we checked ahead of time, there's just two thumb screws in the back. And this pops off, access panel. And now this is the interior of the system itself.

All right, so now we're lookin' on the inside of the system and you see there's a lot of different parts. One thing that really stands out, though is this. This is the power supply itself. It takes standard household current and converts it mainly into 5-volt and 12-volt DC. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this guy out. These are the power connectors that power the main system itself. Now the coupling connectors here. Now, I wanna warn you guys, I've actually done a lot of pre-unbuckling to make this easier.

Let's see if we can get this guy out of here. This is always fiddly, bear with me. This is certainly not something you want to rush. All right, that is a power supply. Now once the power supply is out, we can really see a little bit more clearly what's going on. In particular, I'd like you to notice is this big card right here. And that is our video card. So I'm gonna go ahead and pop him out now.

Video cards, just about any type of card, you have to really be careful about how you remove them. All right, isn't that a pretty video card? He's so cute! Okay, I'm gonna set him off to the side. And let's see what else we have in here. All right, now we can really start to see something. First of all, you'll see I've got one, two ,three, four sticks of RAM. Let me pop one of those out. Any individual piece of RAM is called a stick. I'll just pull one out for 'ya.

And that's a stick of RAM. That is two gigabytes of RAM, by the way, so I have 16 gigabytes of RAM in this particular system. What else do we have? Now, you'll look here, we've got this big fan with a heat sink underneath it. And underneath there, is my CPU. Now I'm not gonna take the fan off right now 'cause it's hard to get on and off. But underneath there is the CPU itself. The real brains of the system that's what makes it all go. This whole piece here is the motherboard.

Pretty much everything that is the computer hooks either directly or indirectly to the motherboard. So like the video card snaps directly in, the RAM snaps directly in, but then other stuff connects through data cables. So for example, here is here's the data cable for if you take a look back in here, this is the rear end of my blu-ray player. So the front obviously sticks out the front so I can put in blu-ray, DVD, CD, whatever optical beat I want. But this is the rear end of that.

And this is, believe it or not, this is the data connection. It's called SATA. It's a SATA cable. Also, I've already got him pretty much all dismantled for ya so I can just pull him out and let you look. But this is a hard drive. Now, one nice thing about look at this, you can see this is the same type of data connection that SATA thing that we see with the optical drive, but right here, this longer connection, it's a power connection. Pretty much, if it doesn't hook directly to the motherboard, it's gonna have some kind of data connection and some kind of power connection.

So this is a, believe it's a 3 terabyte? Yes, this is a 3 terabyte hard drive. All right, and how that's pretty much the basics. Other than that, we have all of these are connections, for example. I've got USB and audio connections in the very front of the case. And these are the connections that are used to make those connections in the front work. And then finally, where is it? This guy right here, this is for my reset switch in the front, my hard drive light, my power light and all that kind of stuff that's in the front.

And that actually fits in here, so that I can make it go. And that, my friends, is a pretty standard interior of a system. We got, those are your main components. You might also see stuff for example is that we got some fan connectors and things like that, but pretty much these are the things you're gonna be seeing on the inside of a typical system unit. (uptempo jazz music)