What are files?
• When you load a program such as a word processor this means that you copy the files containing the word processor program from your hard disk into your RAM memory. RAM is short for Random Access Memory and is simply a term to describe the memory chips contained within your computer. Once the word processor is loaded into RAM you can use it to create a document. When you have finished editing the document, you may want to save a copy of the document to your hard disk as a file. Basically there are two types of file that you need to concern yourself with, the program files (such as word processor, spreadsheet, databases etc) and the data files that you create and save to disk. Once saved to disk you can later reopen that file and make further changes, or print the data file. In many ways you can think of data files as physical sheets of paper, containing your data. You then place these sheets within a folder so that you keep all similar documents together.
What are folders?
• Files are stored on a disk in folders. This concept is very familiar to anyone used to working within an office. Think of a 3-draw filing cabinet. When you wish to file a document within the filing cabinet you first need to decide in which draw to file a particular document. When you open a filing cabinet draw it often contains hanging dividers allowing you to group similar document together.
Types of drive and drive letters
• When you save a data file you normally save it to your hard disk. This disk is contained within your computer and you cannot normally see it. By convention the hard drive is called ‘Drive C’. If you have two hard disks within a single computer they will normally be described as drive ‘C’ and drive ‘D’.
• There are other types of drive, such as a CD or DVD drive. You can plug ‘removable hard disk’ into the back of your computer. You can plug so called ‘memory sticks’ into the USB sockets on your computer. Don’t worry what USB stands for (Universal Serial Bus), they are just sockets that allow you to plug things into your computer. There are many different names for these USB memory sticks, such as ‘Flash drives’ or ‘USB drives’
• As you add more drives to the computer, Windows assigns a drive letter to them. The hard disk is usually called drive C. The next disk that is added (probably the CD/DVD drive) will be called drive D, the next drive would be
Drive E and so on.
• If you are connected to a network, your network administrator may have set you up with additional ‘network drives’. These are actually located within a different computer on your network and can have any free drive letter that the network administrator thinks is appropriate (such as Drive T).
|
