A+ and basic PC questions

1. What are the basic expansion card types?ISA and PCI, ISA can be used only on XT, AT and ATX boards. The industry now considers ISA obsolete.
2. How do you clear CMOS password? Since CMOS is a special chip with its own battery, the best way to clear out a CMOS chip is to disconnect it from its power supply.
3. Where does the Real mode on the CPU come from? The original 8086, which only had 1 MB of memory. This megabyte is split into low memory for IRQ tables, application memory and high memory.
4. Where does CPU Enhanced mode originate from? Intel’s 80386 was the first 32-bit processor, and since the company had to backward-support the 8086. All the modern Intel-based processors run in the Enhanced mode, capable of switching between Real mode (just like the real 8086) and Protected mode, which is the current mode of operation.
5. Name the processor lines of two major manufacturers? High-end: Intel - Pentium (II, III, 4), AMD - Athlon. Low-end: Intel - Celeron, AMD - Duron. 64-bit: Intel - Itanium 2, AMD - Opteron.
6. What’s the difference between L1 and L2 cache? Level 1 cache is internal to the chip, L2 is external.
7. What’s the speed and device maximum specs for Firewire? IEEE 1394 (Firewire) supports the maximum of 63 connected devices with speeds up to 400 Mbps.
8. Where’s MBR located on the disk? Main Boot Record is located in sector 0, track 0, head 0, cylinder 0 of the primary active partition.
9. What’s the maximum hard drive size for FAT16-based Windows system? 2 GB.
10. How many logical drives is it possible to fit onto a physical disk? Maximum of 24 logical drives. The extended partition can only have 23 logical drives.
11. WHat are * and ? when using them for wildcards in Windows? * - any characters, arbitrary amoung, ? - single character.
12. How does the browser know to go to a certain IP address when you enter a domain like google.com? It searches through local DNS cache, if nothing is there, it queries the ISP’s DNS server.