I gotta say, I’m shocked at how much engagement my first post got on TikTok. I know this is a popular cert, but I didn’t expect this many people to be looking after it. I got more views on that post than all my other posts combined. So I want to thank yall for all the love
I’m using the 2023 Exam Training app. I paid for the pro version. There’s over 1400 questions on there, and I’ve already glazed over them once.
So to get this done, I’m gonna break it all down. There are 9 sections and 5-9 parts per section. So for myself, I’m gonna write all these questions down with their answers, and I’ll be researching each one so I’m able to speak about them casually and not just recite the answers like a robot. I’m not about to post all those questions on here. In these posts, I’ll be summarizing everything I learned from each section.
Storage Drives
Now, we all know that computers are meant to store information. Every PC, and MacBook up till 2016, uses what’s called a SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment). It’s not exactly the hard drive, it just bridges the drive to the computer. It’s technically an interface.
Hard drive and storage drive are used interchangeably. Basically, all hard drives do deal with storage, but they’re not strictly meant for storage either. We’ll get into that later.
The 2 most common types of drives are HDD (hard disk drive) and SSD (solid state drive).
HDD is the more traditional one. It uses spinning magnetic platters with an actuator arm that reads the data off these platters. Kinda like a record player, but it’s a little deeper than that. And SSDs use flash technology.
In terms of how they store the data, HDDs are sequential, and SSDs are random; one is in order and one isn’t. To me this is splitting hairs because in terms of accessing an image or document, it’s still the same thing. SSD isn’t random in the sense you have to scramble through everything to find what you’re looking for. The search function still works either way. It really comes down to how fast they can access this data, which SSDs are better at. An image or document won’t usually take much time to load up, so this probably pertains more to long videos or audio recordings; I have a musician friend who has a HDD with thousands of Logic plugins in it, and that takes a while to load up.
So it seems like SSDs are the move unless cost is an issue. Only thing about them is they have a certain amount of ‘writes’ they can do before they stop working. So just how a regular car can have its tank refilled as long as it works, an electric car will have a set limit of charges it can take. A gas tank can be maintained almost indefinitely, but when that electric car’s battery is done, it’s done.
Form Factors
Just how there are regular clothes, not all clothes fit the same person, physically or aesthetically. To find out how to match clothes to a person, we look at their physical characteristics: height, body type, skin tone, hair color and texture, etc.
This is what I thought a form factor was at first, a computer’s external physical characteristics like its color or screen. It’s really more about the internal layout, like a person’s muscle mass, bone structure or overall biological makeup. A computer’s form factor is the type of motherboard it has, type of expansion cards it takes. Or like all cars have an engine, drivetrain, and alternator, but they’re all set up in different ways.
I’ll have to unpack this more later, so for now I’ll just do the tidbits the questions took me through
So there’s an expansion bus called a PCI, Peripheral Component Interconnect. That was the original version, the modern one is a PCIe, ‘e’ for express, along with a mini version. It’s made to upgrade a computer’s capabilities. As to what those capabilities are, all I’m seeing is more processing power and wi-fi & Bluetooth connectivity to a computer that didn’t already have it.
So in car terms, it’s like taking an old 90s car and installing a touchscreen radio that lets you do modern things in it.
There are also different types and pin connectors for PCIes. For now I’ll just state, a mini PCIe Type III with a 52-pin connector is the most common type for a standard laptop.
There are different wi-fi network standards, all called 802.11 followed by a letter. 802.11 is just a naming convention by the IEEE, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The number doesn’t mean anything in terms of the system.
The most common wi-fi network standards are 802.11 a, b, g, n, ac, ax, and ay. We’ll unpack those later. The only main differences are faster speed, shorter range, and slower speed, longer range.
Mobile Phones
Remember how if you had a Sprint phone, and you were going to a different carrier, you couldn’t transfer it over, the phone was only good for Sprint? That’s because Sprint was a Code Division Multiple Access carrier, a CDMA. The one that allows those transfers is the Global System for Mobile Communications, GSM.
These are cellular network technologies.
Supposedly CDMA had better coverage and call quality, which is funny because Sprint was notorious for having poor connection and dropped calls, and T-Mobile too for a time but they retired from CDMA.
It seems like the only thing it might’ve had over GSM was more ‘security’, less prone to interceptions. Unless you’re worried about getting hacked, that’s not really a concern for the average person. So it seems like it’s all exclusivity without higher quality. I’d like to learn more about this down the line because I’m wondering why is it even an option outside of a private organization that wants a closed phone system? Like how the cartel has its own cell towers.
So while those are cellular network technologies, there are also mobile network technologies, which still sound the same. Mobile network tech pertains to the generations or the ‘G’s’, like 2G, 3G, 4G, etc. 2G is the bare minimum for a phone, allowing calls and texts. 3G improved on call quality and enabled video calling, web browsing, and basic multimedia streaming. 4G introduced LTE Long-Term Evolution whose main improvement was high-quality video streaming like for Netflix and YouTube, and online gaming. 5G is the frontier of this tech now. I don’t know what else to say besides it’s faster but it’s supposedly making way for new technologies like augmented reality.
Next we have 2 concepts called MAM and MDM, Mobile Application Management, and Mobile Device Management. They’re pretty self-explanatory. If you built your own app, you’d have to do a lot of MAM to maintain it. MDM is broader for any organization that relies on mobile devices. Even like a small doctor’s office where all the employees use iPads.
Next we got different touchscreen technologies: Capacitive is the most popular one. iPhones, Androids, tablets, and touchscreen computers. It allows for multi-finger gestures, they’re a lot smoother and more responsive. Compare that to resistive touch which is more old school and industrial. Like ticket kiosks, parking meters, ATMs or POS store registers. There’s also Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) touchscreens. I’m having trouble understanding the difference between these and resistive outside of the way they’re made. Both are for more commercial or industrial uses like casino games, outdoor displays or those scanner guns they use at warehouses; their uses seem to be the same.
We all have an International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) which is basically your social security number for your personal phone plan. Your SIM card has this number along with all your phone identifications.
Displays
Most modern displays are LCDs, which is liquid crystal, but this is just for the screen. Most LCDs are lit by LEDs.
LED stands for light-emitting diode, which is basically a bunch of dots that light up. There’s an organic OLED that minimizes power and a quantum QLED with higher vibrancy and color
Past those you got special variations like In-Plane Switching (IPS), Vertical Alignment (VA) and Twisted Nematic (TN). They’re all still LCD screens with LED lights, but they have their own properties of response time, viewing angles, and contrast ratios.
Mail protocols
There are 2 main email retrieval protocols Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3), and Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). An organization typically has a mail server, but some don’t. In short, POP3 is for a single device, so it’s faster and easier to access, and IMAP has multiple devices so team members can collaborate on the emails.
There’s a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) that’s used for sending. Whether you use POP3 OR IMAP, you need SMTP for a full cycle mail server.
And finally, there’s Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) that handles security and encryptions with the emails along with enabling digital signatures.
Grant Abraham 