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A Question About Computers


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#1 thedanphillips

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Posted 13 January 2010 - 01:19 AM

Well, I like to study little things that I don't understand, since I was little I've always taken gifts for christmas or birthdays and stuff apart to see what makes it work. I've always been into knowing what makes things do what they do.

I am curious to know how pushing the power button actually initializes the computer. Not like how it powers up the CPU and other hardware devices but how it reads that push of the button. What exactly happens when you push the button, does the click send out a signal? Is it a transistor of some sort that is being switched on and off? I'm sure it's the likely case, but I just want to know for sure. I find it fascinating how the energy coming through my wall to the power cord plugged into my PSU turns that electrical current into binary and tells these metal pieces and chips and all the tiny little nanometer sized materials to do what they do.

If someone would please clear up what the power button does behind the scenes that would be awesome.

It's a noob question, but google and bing weren't helping. Just found "why won't my computer turn on" problems haha.

Thanks.

#2 Demonslay

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Posted 17 January 2010 - 04:13 PM

Ya, power issues are a common issue, so you would get mostly those results. I'm a computer technician, so I feel I should be able to answer your question semi-decently atleast.

When you press the power button, physically it is really like a switch. The power button is wired to two pins on the motherboard, and when these pins are joined by this 'switch', it initiates the signal that power is need to be applied. The power button thus isn't the only way to turn on the computer, and if you were to remove those wires, you can 'jump' the pins with anything metal like a screwdriver (this is how to test that the power button isn't bad by chance, people do tend to abuse them sometimes like all buttons). Basically if you were to take the power button apart, its literally just two wires coming in and not touching, then when you press the button in it connects the two with a small piece of metal or something to connect them just like a light switch does.

Once the motherboard gets this connection, I'm honestly not sure how things work at the atomic level with electricity and such, but the power supply takes the 120V of power from your house and actually cuts it down to different voltages the different parts of the computer needs; generally about 5V to 12V for each part. From there, each component gets power and does what they are programmed to do to check with themselves kind of, but the BIOS is whats responsible for actually reading them all and checking.

After that its really alot to explain, but I'm sure you can figure it out from there. Like I said, I honestly can't explain much on the lower level of how each and every transistor and capacitor works on the motherboard and other components to actually make the electrical signals, or let-alone how the processor actually works electrically; that's been something way over my head, I just understand the basics of what it actually does to theoretically work, and thus enough to actually be useful to my job lol.

Hope that helps some. ;)

#3 rc69

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Posted 18 January 2010 - 01:41 AM

Since i just finished taking my EE credits (a Digital Logic and a Micropressor course), i should be able to explain what happens after the power button is pressed... Unfortunately, it is all so complex that i can't really think of a way to summarize it without loosing something (or getting it horribly wrong).

All i can say is, the hardware runs off of nothing but logic gates (i.e. and/or/not/nor/nand/etc...). These logic gates are put together to form more complex logic gates such as mutiplexers (MUX), encoder/decoders, an arithmatic logic unit (ALU) and more importantly: registers (a.k.a memory). All of these things come together and direct where all the data in the computer go. Throw an OS on top of that, and you're good to go.

#4 Faken

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Posted 19 January 2010 - 09:55 AM

All i can say is, the hardware runs off of nothing but logic gates (i.e. and/or/not/nor/nand/etc...). These logic gates are put together to form more complex logic gates such as mutiplexers (MUX), encoder/decoders, an arithmatic logic unit (ALU) and more importantly: registers (a.k.a memory). All of these things come together and direct where all the data in the computer go. Throw an OS on top of that, and you're good to go.


LOL for the love of God.... you lost me by the 12th word. ;)

#5 rc69

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Posted 19 January 2010 - 07:22 PM

:)




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