Datasheet

 Memory card reader: An alternative to directly downloading using a cable
from a digital camera is to use a card reader that plugs into a . . . say it with
me . . . USB port on the laptop. Some readers are specific to a particular
type of memory media, such as CompactFlash or SmartMedia, and some
offer four to six slots intended to work with most of the common designs.
Going Through Windows
It would be hard to find a computer user who hasn’t been exposed to Windows —
the operating system for PCs and PC-based laptops. (A small slice of the com-
puter world uses Linux, which is the same idea, differently expressed; Apple
users use that company’s equivalent.)
But relatively few users understand the real purpose of the operating system
and its interrelation with the hardware and software that sit (in logical terms)
below and above it. Let me try to explain. The job of Windows is to
 Manage the hardware. Windows sits between the hardware and your
applications with hooks into each. When a piece of software — a word
processor, for example — wants to load a file into memory for editing,
Windows receives the request and translates it into a command that the
hardware can fulfill. Hardware must fit within certain specifications in
order to work with PC motherboards and processors, but various compo-
nents have differing capabilities; manufacturers develop a small piece of
code called a
driver that identifies hardware to the operating system.
 Manage the software. Similarly, software developers have a fairly wide lati-
tude in the sort of tasks they can assign to their programs. However, there
has to be a way for a single piece of software to interact uniformly with the
nearly infinite combinations of hardware that exist within computers. The
job of Windows is to adapt the software commands to what it knows about
the capabilities of the hardware. Windows also allocates the use of the
computer’s memory and processor time so that various programs can
coexist without conflicts and crashes. (Do I hear a guffaw out there? I’m
with you . . . but it’s true that with each successive release and update of
Windows, the number of system crashes and other failures has gone down.
May we all live to celebrate the extermination of the final bug.)
 Manage the files. If you have a hard time this morning remembering where
you put your keys, consider the fact that a typical computer has to remem-
ber the location of tens or hundreds of thousands of programs, snippets
of information, and complete files. (On my main work machine, my
antivirus checking program most recently found something like 450,000
files worth checking . . . and half a dozen pieces of spyware it recom-
mended for obliteration.) Windows oversees the creation and management
Foraging for Hardware — Going Through Windows 19
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