Motherboard's: How they Work

Unfortunately I had no clue what a motherboard was before I enrolled in this class. I wouldn't say I am completely computer illiterate, but when it comes to what holds and molds computers together, I am clueless. This is why I chose to do my findings on the motherboard. From what I took in, I guess this is what ties everything together. Their main job is to allow all of the parts of your computer to gain power and communicate with one another. No computer can operate without the motherboard because this is what holds the microprocessor chip and allows everything else to connect to it.

Motherboards have done some major growing up in the last twenty years. They now hold a very wide variety of built in features as oppose to twenty something years ago when all they held was very few components like a processor and card slots which users would then have to plug floppy drive controllers and memory into the slots.

Motherboards are available in a variety of form factors. Form factors refer to the size and format of the motherboard. Here are some of the different PC motherboard sizes available:

PC/XT-This is the original motherboard standard created by IBM

AT form factor- The first form factor to gain wide acceptance

Baby AT- This was functionally equivalent to the AT, but gained a lot of praise due to its smaller physical size.

ATX- This is the most popular form factor available today.


Motherboard Review: ASUS P5W DH Deluxe
While researching the different types of motherboards, I came across one that got my attention. This motherboard is known as the P5W DH Deluxe. This is ASUS' third designed motherboard, and from what I have read, it appears to be their best one yet. This motherboard is designed using the Intel 975x chipset. The P5W DH Deluxe has many features that make it suitable as a workstation, a gaming platform or a small office or home office computer.

ASUS has also included a feature in the Deluxe model which they refer to as EZ-backup. What the EZ-backup does it secure the data on your hard drives through the SATAII interface and RAIDO.

Check out ASUS' new version by clicking here:
http://www.techspot.com/review/12-asus-p5wdh-deluxe/

Robot Nurses Ready for Hospitals Soon

Scientists from universities in Germany, Ireland and Britian are among the experts taking part in the IWARD project. So, what is this project all about? Well, project leader Thomas Schelgal from the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany came up with an innovative idea that could potentially help with the shortages of nurses in hospitals. These robot nurses, that he hopes will be ready for 2010 would eliminate some stress on human nurses by providing robotic help within hospitals. These robot nurses would help to clean up spills, deliver messages and guide visitors around the hospital, bringing them to their correct destination. Schlegal hopes that these robot nurses will even in some time, be able to distribute medicines to the specific patients and even monitor patients temperatures with laser thermometers!

This project aims at specifically helping out in hospitals by eliminating some of the stress nurses undergo each day. By having these robot nurses, the human nurses are able to focus on more important tasks while their robot nurses are able to focus on the less important ones. These robots would work in teams to communicate with each other and be able to coordinate duties among each.

So what will these robots look like? Well, each robot would consist of a mobile platform mounted with a module of sensors, cameras and equipment for different tasks. These sensors and cameras would help the robots to avoid collisions while traveling throughout the hospitals. These robots would also come with voice and face recognition technology to communicate with patients.

Interesting idea Schlegal, but it will be more interesting to see how badly your idea fails.