What Basic Hardware Skills would you introduce?

[Advocate]

As part of a wider project I asm going to be taking a series of 4 workshops on the basics of hardware skills so upgrading memory, changing a hard drive, memory types, ide and sata etc - so this will be appox 10-15 hours in total. Firstly I will take this to some undergraduate female students and then to secondary school female students. Has anyone done anything similar? or any ideas of what else I should introduce them to, ie different os types? or is that going to be too much for the time I have to do it justice?

 

Ideas welcome please

[penfold]

Break it down into building a PC, and when they have done that, how to troubleshoot boot problems such as cables unplugged etc. You might want to cover the basic OS requirements as it might be usefull to help them identify requirements of different OS version and restrictions (such as the memory it can see) and that the hardware isn't always seen by the software.

[JaTayler]

When i was at Secondary School, i joined a club at the end of the day where we built the machines that were to be used in the ICT Suite.

 

We were given the basic motherboard to which we would eventually install the CPU, Heatsink, Fan, Memory, CMOS etc... The teacher would show us what we had to do for the certain part we were fitting that day & we would then go away and do it, for example, the CPU, we would be shown the correct way a CPU should fit into the socked on the motherboard & how to secure it, then how to apply the heatsink & install the cooling plate on top. We would then go away and do this to the machines.

 

When all the motherboard stuff was complete, we moved onto the power connections and Hard Drives, CD Drives etc...

 

Once everything was complete, we installed them into the ICT Suite. We didn't touch any of the OS or software stuff, that was done for us but the teacher.

Just that little bit we did was useful for when i got to college & moved into other things like reseating Memory, installing a Parallel Printer etc...

[pete]

Perhaps basic "how to determine whether X is working / as it should be?":

 

Hard disk making a death rattle vs hard disk that's happy

Bulging capacitor / non-bulging capacitor

Checking fans for seizing

The magic smoke smell vs normal hot electronics

 

Basic stuff that lets them determine "yup, that's fubar".

[SkreeM1980]

I'd suggest you take a look at the A+ study guides and see what the basic topics covered are then pick the most important ones that you can fit in your time window. Although building a PC week by week is a pretty cool project based way of learning.

[mac_shinobi]

peripheral cards ie PCI, PCI Express, AGP ( although its dead ), difference in cable connectors ie vga, DVI-I , DVI - D, USB, PS 2 ( although again not existant )

 

Identifying ports on the back of the motherboard ie vga, usb, parallel / serial / RJ45 aka NIC connector etc etc

 

Also upgrading the machine safely so disconnecting mains lead - and if relevant any cables ie if you are replacing a graphics card you don't want to try and yank it out whilst its still connected to the display via VGA, DVI or HDMI etc

 

Anti static wrist strap / matt ??

 

Connector / interface types are important, had a few people not check what type of hard drive a laptop uses and trying to shove a sata drive in when its ide and bending all the pins or visa versa and the laptop needing a sata drive and bending the pins on the drive itself.

 

Correct power supply as far as wattage ratings which will be calculated by how many devices etc you plan to run / use etc.