Answers to Review Questions
Portable computers have two ideal characteristics: They are compact and lightweight. Portable computer designers work constantly to decrease the size and power consumption of a computer's components. Special low-power consumption ICs and disk drives have been developed to extend battery life. For more information, see the section "Portable System Components."
Its physical size and layout, its power consumption, and whether the BIOS supports it. For more information, see the section "Portable Drives."
A docking station is a specialized structure in which the portable is inserted to extend its expansion bus so that a collection of desktop devices can be used with it. In this way, one can use a collection of desktop devices such as an AC power source, a full-sized keyboard and CRT monitor, as well as modems, mice, and standard PC port connectors. For more information, see the section "Docking Stations."
Standby mode, suspend mode, and hibernate mode. Standby mode turns off selected system components until a system event occurs. Suspend mode places the system in a shut down condition except for its memory units. Hibernate mode writes the contents of RAM memory to a hard drive file, and completely shuts down the system. For more information, see the section "Power Management."
The Fn function key activates special functions in the portable, such as display brightness and contrast. For more information, see the section "Keyboards."
If the type of RAM device being installed is not one of the recommended types, the notebook might not be able to recognize the new memory. If the new RAM is being added to expand the existing banks of memory, the system might not recognize this additional RAM. The problem shows up in the form of a short memory count during the POST routines. However, if only the new RAM type is installed, the system could present a number of different symptoms. For more information, see the section "Installing Portable Memory."
In a portable computer, the network card is installed into a PCMCIA slot. For more information, see the section "Networking Portables."
Socket services is a methodology for software programmers to write standard drivers for PC card devices and provides for a software head to identify the type of card being used, its capabilities, and its requirements. For more information, see the section "PC Cards."
The cardbus slot has intelligent software that interrogates cards when they are inserted into the slot. If the slot finds that the card is a PC card, it configures itself to function like a conventional PCMCIA slot. However, if an advanced cardbus card is inserted, the slot reconfigures itself to use the 32-bit bus width and increases speed and low-voltage capabilities of the cardbus specification. For more information, see the section "Cardbus."
A stationary pointing device. For more information, see the section "Touch Pads."
External CD-ROM drives typically connect to a SCSI host adapter, or to an enhanced parallel port on the host computer. For more information, see the section "External CD-ROM Drives."
The operating system must support the PCMCIA slots at two levelsat the socket level (universal support for all PCMCIA devices) and at the card level (specific drivers to handle the functions of the particular card installed). For more information, see the section "Installing PC Cards."
A PC-Card network adapter can be used, or a USB or parallel port-based pocket LAN adapter can be used. For more information, see the section "Networking Portables."
These devices plug in to the notebook computer and contain common PC ports, such as serial and parallel ports. The purpose of these devices is to enable users to attach portable computers to standard, nonportable devices, such as printers and monitors. For more information, see the section "Port Replicators."
Hewlett-Packard introduced the first touch-screen monitor in 1983. These screens divide the display into rows and columns that correspond to x and y coordinates on the screen. This technology has been adapted to notebook computers in the form of touch-pad pointing devices. For more information, see the section "Touch Pads."