For teachers and most people, hardware is not as important as software. However, there is a lot of thing that hardware can do that software can't (although as you learnt hardware usually has to have drivers in order for it to work). You may wish to know that there are different kinds of mouses, monitors, printers, etc. You'll learn more about this in a moment.

When you have two or more operating systems on one computer, you can setup a dual boot operating system, where you can choose which one you wish to load upon startup. You can split a hard drive into more hard drives (which splits up the diskspace as well), called a disk partition (using the fdisk DOS command). You can add more diskspace and make your computer faster by compressing it usually setting your File Allocation Table from FAT16 to FAT32. (FAT being the way your file system is setup on the hard drive, using Drive Converter to do this). You can completely delete everything off your hard drive and reinstall everything (CD-ROM drivers are taken off as well, you'll have a blank hard drive and a floppy disk drive) by formatting it, using the
format c: DOS command. To partition or format again, is called repartition or reformat. Formatting is used when the operating system will no longer work (where using a startup disk to reinstall the operating system may not have worked). It can be used to wipe out viruses completely. Your CMOS or BIOS (which controls the internal clock inside the computer) is not affected by these procedures. When two or more hardware devices are installed that perform the same fuction (a mouse, etc.), a hardware conflict may stir because the computer doesn't know which advice to use.
You can have more than one drive in a computer at a time.

In case you didn't notice, everything above was advanced, even for me. Below will be alittle more clearer.

Mice

Mouses are made in many ways: a trackball mouse (where your palm moves a ball to move your cursor), a wheel mouse (has a wheel in the center which is used for scrolling on scrollbars, etc.) and a three button mouse (where the third button, placed in the middle, usually functions as a double-click or even scrolling). You already learnt about the mice with one-touch navigation.

Keyboards

Among the commonly used keyboards are the natural keyboard (which is just a notmal keyboard, maybe a few buttons different on some) and wave keyboards (which are in a form of an S shape). I've seen an Internet keyboard and figure that its main use is for Internet purposes, since the Internet is becoming more and more popular each day.

Monitors

Monitors (comes in black or white or in color) can display graphics in a few ways, two of them being the popular choices. SVGA (Super Video Graphic Array) can display graphics and video better than VGA. But in order to display video, you must have a video card installed in your system, and for it to display your graphics, you must have a display card installed in your system. These cards will determine how well your graphics and videos are displayed in your monitor. 3-D acceleration cards will display graphics better than a normal video card. With them (all three) they use video memory (or can help provide some for you) which will determine the speed and performance of such cards.

Speakers

Speakers can come with subwoofers which will help make the sound surround-sound. These can be internal (hardware built inside the computer, with speakers being built inside the monitor, snapped or clipped inside the system unit) or external (hardware that is plugged into the back of the system unit). In order for speakers to produce sound, you must have a sound card installed in your computer system (which you know as the system unit).

Printers

Your printer prints out different media (paper) in different sizes, depending on the software you used. To print (if this isn't so in a program than you are unable to print) go to File, then Print. Types of printers include the Inkjet, Bubble Jet (both in color and black and white) and the Laser Jet (black and white, some kinds will allow color but different measures has to be taken to do this). The ink, which makes your document's text or a picture on the paper put in by the printer, is stored in a cartridge. Your printer is an HP Inkjet???.

Storage-Capacity Drives

A CD-ROM drive (ROM= Read-only Memory) will only read CDs - no data (files) can be stored (put on) it. It will read music CDs, game CDs (excluding video games, where it will only read the music soundtrack where available), and software CDs. Only movie CDs (called DVDs) can be read (which allows you to watch them) through a DVD-ROM drive. DVD stands for Digital Versitile (Video will work too) Disc. A CD-R drive (recordable) will allow you to store data on a CD made specifically for this as many times as possible, while a CD-W drive (writeable) will allow you to store data on a CD once. A DVD-RAM will allow data to be stored on a DVD specifically made for this. All of these drives come in speed with X afterwards, like 24X. CDs can store about 650 MB of space while a DVD can store gigabytes of space. 3 1/2 Floppy Disk drives will take 3.5 high density IBM-formatted diskettes (disks for short). There are unformatted disks (Macs use these), but the process of reformatting them can be a hassle. There's even ZIP drives which will hold 100 MB of space on ZIP disks and another drive as well.

The Rest on Hardware

The modem, which is the device that deals with your communications (including Internet) comes in many speeds, 56k being the most coomon. Modem speed is measured in bits per second (bps) and currently a 56k modem can get no more than about 53.3 bps. A microphone (which can come in many types, like on a headset) allows your voice to be recorded and/or played through the speakers. A scanner is a copy machine that will copy colored items as well as black and white.

perpherials - what the computer uses to get a job done
input devices - keyboard, etc. what you use to naviagte through the computer
game pads- controllers and joysticks