Shelly Cashman Series Lab - Understanding the Motherboard


Name   ____________________________________


Course and Division _______________________


Date   ___________________      Page 1 of 3


As you step through the Interactive Lab, answer the
following questions in the spaces provided. For multiple
choice questions, enter the appropriate letter on the
blank line.

1. You are mail-ordering a new motherboard for your
computer and see a company offering a 100 MHz 486DX
board and a 75 MHz Pentium board for the same price. Which
one is the better value? Why?

__________________________________________________________

2. Indicate what each of the following acronyms stand for.


ROM  _____________________________________________________


RAM  _____________________________________________________


SIMM  ____________________________________________________


CPU  _____________________________________________________

3. Assume you are working on a word processing document
that you previously saved to disk. You enter another 100
keystrokes and your computer loses power. Will the
document on disk contain the last 100 keystrokes when you
load the document from disk into RAM? Why? What happens
to your work in RAM when you lose power?

__________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________

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Shelly Cashman Series Lab - Understanding the Motherboard
Page 2 of 3



4. A generous friend is helping you upgrade your system by
giving you four 4 MB SIMMs, two 8 MB SIMMs, and a 16 MB
SIMM. If your motherboard has four SIMM sockets, and two
2 MB SIMMs are already installed, what is the maximum
memory configuration you can install? What combination of
SIMMs would you use?

_____________________

__________________________________________________________

5. If it takes one-tenth of a second to blink your eye, and
an activity in RAM takes one nanosecond (one-billionth of
a second), then how many times can the activity in RAM take
place in the time that it takes you to blink your eye?  

_____________________

6. One SIMM is rated at 60 ns, and another is rated at
90 ns. Which one of the two is the fastest?

_____________________

7. The _____________ program is permanently stored in ROM.

a. AUTOEXEC.BAT 
b. BIOS
c. CONFIG.SYS 
d. COMMAND.COM

8. What are the two parts of the bus? How do they differ in
function? 

_____________  _____________ 

___________________________________________________________

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Shelly Cashman Series Lab - Understanding the Motherboard
Page 3 of 3

9. At any given instant, _____________ component(s) can use
a bus to transport data.

a. one 
b. two
c. four
d. eight

10. Describe the difference between the ISA and EISA bus
architectures.

__________________________________________________________

11. Can an ISA card be used in an EISA slot? Can an EISA
card be used in an ISA slot?

_____________

_____________

12. Describe how the PCI bus structure differs from both
ISA and EISA.

__________________________________________________________

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