Teaching Tip Table 5A.1 on page 187 provides the first 17 binary numbers and their decimal equivalent. A fun exercise is to teach the students to count in binary on their fingers.
Insider information Windows XP, Mac OS X and newer flavors of Linux are fully Unicode compatible.
Teaching tip Table 5A.4 on page 190 lists the operations handled by the common ALU.
Insider information More pipelines mean a faster and more efficient CPU. The current fastest CPU on the market, the Apple G5 has 80 pipelines!
Teaching tip If you are in a computer lab, spend a few minutes exploring your BIOS. Demonstrate what happens when values are adjusted. Walk through a POST check. Unplug a device and generate POST errors. Be sure to reset everything before moving on with the lecture!
Teaching tip One of the most commonly asked questions is “How do I speed up my computer”. The simplest answer is to add RAM. The Productivity Tip on page 200 provides some guidelines when to add RAM.
Teaching tip Spend a little time here discussing over clocking. Over clocking causes the computer to run faster than designed. Possibly, you have students that can share stories of over clocking.
