Personal computer hardware is
very similar between desktops and laptops. But there are some differences
in the smaller laptop form factor. In this video,
we'll look at some of those unique differences
in laptop hardware. One thing that you'll
notice immediately when sitting down at a
laptop is that the keyboard is very different. You don't have the room that
you have available on a desktop computer, so a lot of the
laptop keyboard functions have been shrunk down into
a smaller form factor. For example, you'll
notice the keyboard itself is much more
compact, many of the keys are next to each other. For instance, the
function keys at the top are much closer to the
number keys at the top. You'll also notice that some
of the larger grouping of keys to the right, such as page
up and page down and delete, are not on a laptop computer. You simply don't have
the room available to put those extra keys
off to the side. There are some
people, though, that prefer these larger keyboards. They might buy a larger
laptop with a 17 inch monitor or a very wide monitor. And in those cases, you might
have the regular keyboard and then perhaps a numeric
keypad off to the right. But you'll notice
you still don't have the very large
keyboard that you might have with a desktop computer. To be able to put
all of the keys you need into this
smaller form factor, you'll notice some keys
like home, end, page up, and page down are
smaller buttons at the top of the
numeric keypad. Every laptop is a
little bit different so you have to look at how
the keyboard is laid out to be able to find all of
the keys that you might need. The components that we
use to store information are also quite
different on a laptop. On a desktop computer, you
may have a 3 and 1/2 inch hard drive. This is a relatively large
drive when you compare it to the smaller 2 and
1/2 inch drives that are available inside
of laptop computers. On many laptop computers,
we're using solid-state drives. These are smaller drives
that have no spinning parts, no moving components. They are all solid-state
memory, and that's where all of our
information is being stored. These drives are silent because
they have no moving parts and they're very
fast response times because you're writing
directly to memory. You'll find that the
performance of an SSD usually much better than
a traditional hard drive. This 2 and 1/2 inch
form factor is very common for hard drives in SSDs. You might even find a
1.8 inch form factor on older hard drives, although
that form factor has slowly become less popular
because SSDs are able to get smaller and smaller
inside of the laptop case. There's also a
middle ground between the traditional spinning hard
drive and a solid-state drive, and that would be a hybrid drive
or an SSHD, solid-state hybrid drive. This is a drive that has
both spinning components, with the traditional hard drive,
and solid-state components that you would find in an SSD. The SSD is often used to cache
the information as it's being read or written to the drive. That way, you're able to
write information very quickly and then continue performing
functions on your laptop. The hybrid drive then takes all
of the information in the SSD and writes it to the hard drive
separate from the operation of your laptop. And of course,
you can still find the traditional spinning hard
drive and a 2 and 1/2 inch form factor inside of
laptop computers. Even though an SSD does
provide better performance, we tend to find
larger capacities with the spinning hard drives. So for the same
amount of money, you could store much
more information on a spinning hard
drive versus an SSD. The storage drives in
a laptop are usually accessible by removing a
cover that's on the back or removing the entire
back of the laptop to be able to gain access
to those components. These are usually relatively
modular and easy to swap out. You can take the cover off,
remove a couple of screws, and then remove the drive. Here's the back of
a typical laptop. This laptop requires you to
remove a number of screws from the back and you remove
the entire panel of the back. Some laptops have a
single panel that you might remove to get access
to individual pieces, such as the memory modules. Let's open this up and we'll
look and see what's inside. There's the laptop components. We can see this is
a 17 inch laptop. It's relatively large. It's designed to have multiple
hard drives, which is not really usual in a laptop. But this particular model
does have two separate storage devices. You can see the primary
processor is here, along with what appears
to be the graphics card. And the copper is
the cooling that goes to these heat sinks in
the back that has a fan that helps cool everything. The memory modules are stacked
one right on top of each other. And we've got, on the bottom
right, a number of cards. This is my wireless LAN card. There's a slot here for a
wireless cellular card, which I don't have in this laptop. And then the Bluetooth
card, the wireless PAN, personal area network card. These storage devices
in laptops are designed to be relatively
easy to replace. This one requires you to
remove a couple of screws and then it pops out. Let's remove the first screw. We'll remove the second screw. And in this
particular model, you would simply lift up and remove
the drive from the laptop. To replace the drive, you
simply reverse the process. Push it into place,
add the screws, and now your laptop
drive is back in place. Just as our storage devices are
smaller inside of a laptop as compared to a desktop, we
have the same situation with our memory modules. Inside of a laptop,
you might find a SO-DIMM and a Micro-DIMM. These are small outline
dual in-line memory modules or the smaller
micro-dual in-line memory modules. These are almost
exclusively used in laptops and smaller devices,
although some of the very, very small motherboards you
might find on your desktop might use micro-DIMMs
or SO-DIMMs as well. I've zoomed in on
the memory modules so we can see these
a little bit better. You can see there are two hooks
on each side of the memory module that holds these in. If we pull these hooks out,
the memory module pops up. Then we can grab
them by the edges and remove the memory
module from the laptop. This laptop has two
sets of memory modules. So if we wanted to
replace both of them, we would do exactly
the same thing. Now let's replace
the memory modules. Notice that we're
going to put the memory modules in with these copper
contacts going all the way into that memory slot. Make sure they're
all the way down. You don't want to have them
sitting out just a little bit. You want to be sure that they
are completely in that slot. And it shouldn't take any
pressure to put these in. They should slide right in
without any pressure at all. And then you can simply push
down until they snap in place. Now let's do this with
the second memory module. In this case, I'm going
to turn the module around. You'll notice the
key is on the side. If you do that, it will not
fit into the memory module, so don't force them in. Instead, make sure the key
is exactly in the place you need it to be,
it fits perfectly with that memory module. And then you should be able
to snap those in place. In many high security
environments, you may be required
to use a smart card as part of your authentication. And so many laptops may
include a smart card reader built into the laptop itself. So when you authenticate
to the network, you have to slide
in your smart card to be able to use that laptop. If there is not a smart
card reader integrated into the laptop,
you may have one that works externally that
connects to the laptop via USB. Our laptops keep
getting smaller and we find that optical media is
being used less and less. And that's why you're
not able to find as many optical drives
available on laptops today as you have in the past. If you do find a laptop
that has an optical drive, very often that optical
drive can be removed and then replaced with a separate storage
drive or some other component. If you do have an optical
drive on a laptop, it's nice to have one
that can both read and write to these
optical drives to use as a backup medium. So this may be a
CD-RM, or CD-ROM, or it might be the newer
DVD-RW, or DVD-ROM. This is all available
in a portable device so that no matter
where you are, you're able to access or write
to this optical media. With many of our
laptop technologies, we're not connecting a physical
cable into our network, we're using wireless
technologies. And so you'll find
in a laptop, there may be a number of
different wireless cards. This laptop has three
separate adapter spots. One for an 802.11
wireless connection. There's one that has a W-WAN,
which would be a cellular based wireless connection. And then a W-PAN, the
personal area network. That would be the
Bluetooth wireless network. Here's a closer look at
these three adapter slots. You can see that there are wires
connecting to each of these. These are for the antennas. Usually that antenna wire
will wrap all the way through the laptop and around
the top of the LCD display. You might also find
different form factors for these adapter cards that
you would put into a laptop. For example, the mini
PCI card is on the left and the smaller mini PCI
Express card is on the right. This laptop has a number of
slots for mini PCI Express cards, and I have one for
the wireless personal area network or the Bluetooth card. And you can see there's
a spot for W-PAN. This is the W-PAN card. And there's also an
antenna here for Bluetooth that is labeled blue. To install the card, we put it
all the way into those slots so that we don't have any
of that copper showing. And then we would push it down. And then this particular
card has a single screw that holds it in place
on the right side. Once that screw is down,
the card is installed. The only thing we have
to do with these cards is make sure that the
antenna is also added. This is a simple pressure. These antennas install
into the connector by pushing onto the antenna
connection on the adapter. So you have to get it
in just the right spot and give just a little
bit of pressure. It doesn't take much
and it snaps into place. On a desktop computer,
the video adapter is usually built into the CPU. It's a separate chip
on the motherboard or it's a separate
interface card that's installed in the system. It's a very similar
situation with laptops, although most of
the time, the video is built into the processor
or it's a separate chip on the motherboard. There's not enough room
inside of a laptops to have a full sized video card
as a separate interface card. Because these video
adapters are part of the CPU or are part of the
system board, they're not generally upgradable. All so the vast majority
of laptops you find will have no ability to
upgrade the video components. There are some
laptops, though, that do allow you to upgrade
the video components inside of that laptop. These are usually larger
systems and they're built for people that need
high-end graphics capabilities in a mobile platform. We commonly use LCD displays
on our desktop computers. And we're also using LCD
displays on our laptops as well. These liquid crystal
displays are very light and they provide a very
high resolution screen. These are, of
course, very fragile. Because these laptops tend to
be moved from place to place, you want to be sure to
get a laptop that is well protected whenever
you're moving it from one location to another. One challenge with LCDs
is that the resolutions are fixed on the screen. You can't buy a
larger screen and you can't change the
resolutions of the one that exists inside of the laptop. So if you make changes
to the native resolution, you may find that the graphics
and the information you are viewing on the
screen are not as crisp, they're a little bit fuzzy. So you need to make sure you're
using the native resolution to have the best possible
viewing on this LCD screen. Our computers need direct
current to be able to operate. And on our desktop
computers, there's usually a power supply
that's built into the case. On laptop computers, we don't
have that same amount of room, so usually the
power conversion is done on an external device
that provides DC power directly into the laptop. And usually, there will
be a power interface. And this might be very different
as you look at different laptop computers. This one happens to be a
rounded yellow connector on the back of the laptop. Here's an example of an
external power supply that's used for a laptop. This may be an auto-switching
laptop power supply, which means you could use it on
many different types of power systems, or it may
be fixed input. This converts our AC
coming from the wall into DC that can be used
by the laptop computer. And usually, you'll see
these available to run at 110 volts or 220
volts, depending on where you happen to be in the world. These power supplies are
very specific to the make and the model of the
laptop you're using. So if you need to
replace a power supply, make sure you replace
it with one that's compatible with your system. It's very useful
if you can decipher some of this information that's
on the back of a laptop power adapter. This is a power
adapter from Dell. You can see the part number
listed and the model number. The input voltages on this
particular power supply will support either 100
or 240 volts of AC power. That's the squiggly line. And it provides that at 50
or 60 Hertz and inputs 2.0 amps into this power supply. This power supply will output
19.5 volts of DC power. This is the symbol
for DC power, which is the solid line with the
dashed line underneath. And it outputs 4.62
amps of DC power. The maximum amount
of output power that this particular
power adapter will provide is 90 watts of power
for this laptop. One of the most common
battery technologies used on our laptops
today is lithium ion. This is one that does not have
a memory effect that many of us remember from older
battery technologies. You don't have to deplete the
entire battery before charging it back up like you use to do
with the older style batteries. With lithium ion, you
can charge it at any time and you're not going to
have a significant decrease of its charging capabilities. However, with lithium ion, every
time you charge the battery, there is a little bit of
a diminished capacity. So eventually, as you use that
battery through the years, you'll find that it doesn't
charge as much as it needs to and you'll need to
replace the battery. One thing that you'll notice
between laptop versions is that they often use different
form factors for the batteries. So this is another
scenario where you'll need to look at the make
and the model of the laptop and make sure that
you're purchasing a battery that is specifically
designed for that system. Here's an example of two
different form factors. You can see the
battery on the top has connectors on the end that
would connect in that laptop. And then a completely
different laptop has a different type of
connectivity that it might use. So it's important to
make sure that you're buying the right battery
for the right laptop. Laptops are very mobile
computing devices and you are often using
this device on your lap. That means there's
not a lot of room to be able to use a
traditional mouse. For that reason, laptops include
other types of mouse input. Very commonly, a
touchpad is used. This is usually just
underneath the keyboard. You would use your finger to
move around on the screen using this touchpad. And then there
are left and right buttons that are the same as
the left and right buttons that you might find on
a traditional mouse. Depending on the laptop, you
might have other input choices available. This one also has a
pointing stick that's in the middle of the keyboard. You would put your finger
on that pointing stick and simply push
it in a direction, and it will move the
mouse around the screen. With a desktop system, we're not
moving it from place to place and we often aren't
concerned with how heavy that system happens to be. But with a laptop that we're
dragging from one place to another, we're very concerned
about how heavy this device is. But it also has to
be very durable. For that reason, the
frame around the laptop might be plastic so that it's
very lightweight and very mobile but still very durable
and difficult to break. These are usually very
inexpensive to make as well, which keeps the
cost of the laptop down. Some laptops may have
an aluminum metal case, which is certainly more
durable but more difficult to repair if you happen
to get a dent or break inside of that case. We watch a lot of media and
listen to music on our laptop, so it's important that we
have speakers on these devices as well. These are usually self-contained
into the laptop itself. We don't have the luxury
of external speakers that we might have
on a desktop system. But because these are
smaller speakers that are inside the case, it may
not have the same quality that you're accustomed to
seeing on a desktop computer. There's sometimes a
left and a right channel that you can hear on the laptop,
so you might get stereo sound. And some larger laptops may
have a speaker underneath that's used as a subwoofer. With desktop computers,
the motherboards are all a very
standard set of sizes. But with laptops, you'll
find that different models of laptops have very
different sizes. These proprietary
laptop motherboards are built this way
because you only have so much room
available in a laptop case. This also means that if you have
any problems with any component that is on that
laptop motherboard, you're going to have to
replace the entire motherboard. And usually, this involves
removing a lot of components from the laptop to finally
get the motherboard out of the system and then replace
it and put everything back into that system. Another component
that's very different between a desktop computer
and a laptop computer is the central
processing unit, or CPU. These are designed for
mobile systems, which means they're going to use
as little power as possible because you're often
using a battery. And they're going to try
to create as little heat as possible because it's very
difficult to cool that very small laptop form factor. We also try to put as
many integrated components on the CPU as
possible so that you don't need additional
pieces on the motherboard. So your video controller
and your memory controller are very often part
of the CPU instead of being a separate component. On most laptops, you're
not able to upgrade the CPU that might be built
inside of that laptop system. You may be able to replace
it in case there's a problem, but generally these
laptop motherboards are built for one
specific kind of CPU. And these laptops CPUs
generally don't run as fast as a desktop system
because you have to worry about the heat
and the size of this system inside of this very
small laptop package.
