I’ve been a diehard ThinkPad fan for as long as I could choose my own laptop (around 14 years).  They are not cheap, they don’t necessairly look good by today’s standards and IBM sold the brand to Lenovo a while back.

I’ve been courted to try others (Sony, Acer, Mac) by promises of faster, lighter, better looking, etc. machines and, despite Lenovo now owning the brand, I’ve always found myself returning to the fold and being happy with that choice.  For around 18 months now I’ve been using a ThinkPad X300 (6478-15G to be precise) and have never regretted it, small, light, reliable, SSD and with 4Gb of RAM (yes I know it is not all available to Windows before the comments begin), power a plenty for my type of work.

There comes a point in every so often that in an IT person’s career that you have to plunge into a new technology to understand it before clients start asking about it.  Now I am not going to harp on about how bad vista is, there’s plenty on the web if you are interested – apart from networking and the speed of file copying I liked it after a while (still had an XP machine just case) – I decided to take the plunge and ordered a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate Upgrade and have now been using it for a while.

I must say that the upgrade on my machine was uneventful, in a good way.  The upgrade advisor said everything would be OK except a few programs would need reinstalling (such as iTunes) after the process was complete but seeing as I do not keep any data on my machine (hurray for USB keys and reliable, cheap RAID5 network attached storage) I went for it.  I chose to install a clean copy of Windows 7 (and have the process put the old windows into a windows.old directory just in case) and everyting worked right out of the box except the finger print reader, which was cured by a download from Lenovo.  All in all, very pleased and Windows 7, certainly speed wise, is a vast improvement on this machine.

Suppose a communication line is being used to transmit data serially at 14,400 bps.  If a burst of interference lasts .01 second, how many data bits would be affected?

Suppose a machine has 20GB of storage space available on a hard disk and receives data over a telephone connection at the rate of 14,400 bps. At this rate, how long would it take to fill the available storage space?

Suppose three values (x, y, and z) are stored in a machine’s memory.  Describe the sequence of events (loading registers from memory, saving values in memory, and so on) that lead to the computation of x + y + z.  How about (2x) + y?

Explain each of the following and then their relationship with each other:

a. Register

b. Cache memory

c. Main memory

d. Mass storage

The following message was compressed using LZ77: abr (3,1,c) (2,1,d) (7,3,a). Decompress the message.  Why is the compressed message longer than the decompressed version?

Suppose that only 50GB of your personal computer’s 120GB hard-disk drive is empty.  Would it be reasonable to use CDs to store most of the material you have on the drive as a backup?  What about DVDs?

Identify two advantages that a machine’s main memory has over disk storage.  Identify two advantages that disk storage has over a machine’s main memory.

How many cells can be in a computer’s main memory if each cell’s address can be represented by two hexadecimal digits? What if four hexadecimal digits are used?

Today’s advanced application of Multimedia data is highly dependent on data compression/decompression techniques.  Choose one such technique, discuss it and explain what media types and applications it is best suited for and why.