Internal Components Of A Laptop – Explained

Laptops, notebooks and netbooks are some of the top selling electronic devices in the market these days. Their portability factor, including their compactness and light weight have made them exceedingly popular, especially for official travels. Ask anybody, even a small child, about how a laptop looks, and he will confidently tell you about it. However, the internal components and features are not really well known. The design and functionality of a laptop resembles a desk-top PC in many ways. There are some differences too, that make the laptop a mobile computer. The motherboard, the main processor, the graphics processor, memory, input & output devices, the data transfer buses, the battery form the basic units of a laptop.

There is a main motherboard, on which all the components are built. This board is essentially a printed circuit board (PCB). It consists of slots into which the main processor, graphics processor, main memory can be fitted into. The various ports, connectors, expansion slots and interfaces are also housed on this board. The power connector, the data transfer buses and connectors to the input and output devices are present on this system board as well.

The main processor is to the laptop, like the brain is to the human body. All internal functions are managed by this processor. It fetches instructions from the main memory (RAM) of the laptop, interacts with the operating system to accomplish the tasks and handles the results accordingly. The RAM is a temporary memory used by the laptop to store the programs and applications that are active at a particular point of time. The processor has a small cache memory for itself, where program instructions are stored in advance, for easy access. A considerable amount of heat is generated by the working of the processor. A number of cooling methods, like a fan, heat sink, liquid coolant and more are employed for heat dissipation.

Coming to the graphics processor – it handles all activities related to viewing content – like videos and graphics for games. Multimedia and gaming laptops are equipped with powerful graphics processing units (GPU), to deliver high quality displays. There is always some amount of memory dedicated for graphics processing.

The hard drive of a laptop, is a permanent kind of storage device, where the operating system, the various files, programs and other software are stored.

There are many interfaces and ports offered by the laptop as well. The USB ports, memory expansion slots, Ethernet connector, headphone and microphone jacks, sometimes an HDMI link, FireWire ports are some examples.

Laptops and netbooks use batteries for power supply. Rechargeable Lithium ion batteries are most commonly used. Depending on the number of battery cells used, the life offered will vary. The more the number of cells employed, the more the battery life. However, the weight of the portable PC will also increase accordingly. Hence there is always a trade-off between weight and battery life.

The keyboard and LCD monitor form the input and output devices of the mobile PCs, respectively. Most laptops and notebooks have trackpads with mouse-equivalent buttons for cursor movement and operation. There are drivers and translator that interpet the input from these devices and send them to the processor for further action. Similarly, the output drivers, in conjunction with the graphics processor, handle the displays.

Apart from the main components mentioned above, some laptops have web-cameras, speakers, optical read/write drives, additional security features (finger-print reader) and more as well.

There is never a full stop to technology advancement. With the advent of newer and better technologies, the laptop industry is seeing higher quality, smaller, lighter, faster mobile PCs, with top-notch performance.