Dell PowerEdge 350 - Manual (Page 48)

2 User’s Guide
system fails to respond, you can reboot
(also called warm boot) your system by
pressing <Ctrl><Alt><Del>; otherwise,
you must perform a cold boot by pressing
the reset button (if your system has one)
or by turning the system off and then back
on.
bootable diskette
You can start your system from a diskette
in drive A. To make a bootable diskette,
insert a diskette in drive A, type
sys a:
at the command line prompt and then
press <Enter>. Use this bootable diskette
if your system will not boot from the hard-
disk drive.
bus
A bus forms an information pathway be-
tween the components of a system. Your
system contains an expansion bus that al-
lows the microprocessor to communicate
with controllers for all the various periph-
eral devices connected to the system.
Your system also contains an address bus
and a data bus for communications be-
tween the microprocessor and RAM.
byte
Eight contiguous bits of information; the
basic data unit used by your system.
C
Abbreviation for Celsius.
cache
To facilitate quicker data retrieval, a stor-
age area for keeping a copy of data or
instructions. For example, your system's
BIOS may cache ROM code in faster
RAM. Or a disk-cache utility may reserve
RAM in which to store frequently access-
ed information from your system's disk
drives; when a program makes a request
to a disk drive for data that is in the cache,
the disk-cache utility can retrieve the data
from RAM faster than from the disk drive.
CD-ROM
Abbreviation for compact disc read-only
memory. CD-ROM drives use optical
technology to read data from compact
discs. CDs are read-only storage devices;
you cannot write new data to a CD with
standard CD-ROM drives.
cm
Abbreviation for centimeter(s).
controller
A chip or expansion card that controls the
transfer of data between the micro-
processor and a peripheral such as a
diskette drive or the keyboard.
conventional memory
The first 640 KB of RAM. Unless they are
specially designed, MS-DOS programs
are limited to running in conventional
memory. See also EMM, expanded mem-
ory, extended memory, HMA, memory
manager, upper memory area, and XMM.
coprocessor
A coprocessor relieves the system's mi-
croprocessor of specific processing
tasks. A math coprocessor, for example,
handles numeric processing. A graphics
coprocessor handles video rendering. The
Intel Pentium microprocessor includes an
integrated math coprocessor.
cpi
Abbreviation for characters per inch.
CPU
Abbreviation for central processing unit.
See also microprocessor.
DC
Abbreviation for direct current.
device driver
A device driver allows the operating sys-
tem or a program to interface correctly
with a peripheral such as a printer or net-
work card. Some device drivers—such as
network drivers—must be loaded from
the config.sys file (with a device= state-
ment) or as memory-resident programs
(usually, from the autoexec.bat file). Oth-
ers—such as video drivers—must load
when you start the program for which
they were designed.
DHCP
Acronym for Dynamic Host Configuration
Protocol.