2.1 What’s inside a computer?

If I were to buy a laptop today, I would need to think about the following kinds of hardware options:

• size and weight of the machine
• quality of the display
• processor and its speed
• memory and storage capacity

Several years ago, I built a desktop gaming PC. I had to purchase, assemble, and connect: GPU

• the case
• power supply
• motherboard
• processor
• internal memory
• video card with a graphics processing unit (GPU) and memory
• internal hard drive and solid-state storage
• internal Blu-ray drive
• wireless network USB device
• display
• speakers
• mouse and keyboard

As you can see, I had to make many choices. In the case of the laptop, I would think about why I wanted the machine and what I wanted to do, and much less about the particular hardware. I don...