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Hardware vs. Software |
| Date Added: August 25, 2009 09:13:35 AM |
| Author: Steven |
| Category: Education And Reference |
| In the third millenium the computer is the most advanced machine frequently used all over the globe. It is a great help to everybody in every field of life. It cannot be replaced in medicine, aviation, science and technology, finance and so on. We use it to keep in touch with our friends and relatives, to discover information we require at a swit rate, to establish relationships, to explore the world around us, to be informed about home and foreign affairs and so on. Therefore, we greatly depend on the computer in our everyday life. As it is able to fulfill numerous functions simultaneously, it has a very complicated system. Two main notions are commonly mentioned when the computer is talked about: hardware and software. Hardware contains almost all devices on the computer, inclusive of the motherboard with the central processing unit, the power supply, the video display controller, the removable media devices (floppy disk, CD-ROM Drive/Writer, DVD-ROM Drive/Writer), the internal storage devices (for instance, hard disc), the sound card, the external constituents of a computer system (output and input devices). Hardware is something tangible, because the devices exist physically. To make the hardware devices operate together an appropriate software package is needed to take control of the functionality of the devices. If compared with hardware, software has no material form and includes programmes, data, protocols and so on. Software is commonly stored on the hard disc and is invoked by the operating system to perform certain functions. Software drivers are computer programmes that are intended for interaction with the hardware devices. A driver commonly deals with a hardware device by means of the computer bus or communications subsystem that hardware is connected with. When a calling programme invokes a routine in the driver, the driver gives commands to the device. After obtaining data from the device, the software driver invokes routines in the calling program. Generally, the driver is intended for facilitation of programming by operating as an abstraction layer between a hardware device and an application or the OS which uses it. Hence, it is hardware-dependent and operating system-specific. The terms software and firmware have much in common and are interchangeable sometimes. In fact, firmware is a specific kind of software that takes control of simple operations in a hardware device without which a device is unable to function. To summarize, hardware and software form a whole and, hence, cannot operate on their own. |
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