personal computer hardware is very similar between desktops and laptops but there are some differences in the smaller laptop form factor in this video we'll look at some of those unique differences in laptop hardware one thing that you'll notice immediately when sitting down at a laptop is that the keyboard is very different you don't have the room that you have available on a desktop computer so a lot of the laptop keyboard functions have been shrunk down into a smaller form factor for example you'll notice the keyboard itself is much more compact many of the keys are next to each other for instance the function keys at the top are much closer to the number keys at the top you'll also notice that some of the larger grouping of keys to the right such as page up and page down and delete are not on a laptop computer you simply don't have the room available to put those extra keys off to the side there are some people though that prefer these larger keyboards they might buy a larger laptop with a 17 inch monitor or very wide monitor and in those cases you might have the regular keyboard and then perhaps a numeric keypad off to the right but you'll notice you still don't have the very large keyboard that you might have with the desktop computer to be able to put all of the keys you need into this smaller form factor you'll notice some keys like home end page up and page down are smaller buttons at the top of the numeric keypad every laptop is a little bit different so you have to look at how the keyboard is laid out to be able to find all of the keys that you might need the components that we use to store information are also quite different on a laptop on a desktop computer you may have a three and a half inch hard drive this is a relatively large drive when you compare it to the smaller two and a half inch drives that are available inside of laptop computers on many laptop computers we're using solid state drives these are smaller drives that have no spinning parts no moving components they are all solid state memory and that's where all of our information is being stored these drives are silent because they have no moving parts and they're very fast response times because you're writing directly to memory you'll find that the performance of an ssd is usually much better than a traditional hard drive this two and a half inch form factor is very common for hard drives and ssds you might even find a 1. 8 inch form factor on older hard drives although that form factor has slowly become less popular because ssds are able to get smaller and smaller inside of the laptop case there's also a middle ground between the traditional spinning hard drive and a solid state drive and that would be a hybrid drive or an sshd solid-state hybrid drive this is a drive that has both spinning components with the traditional hard drive and solid-state components that you would find in an ssd the ssd is often used to cache the information as it's being read or written to the drive that way you're able to write information very quickly and then continue performing functions on your laptop the hybrid drive then takes all of the information in the ssd and writes it to the hard drive separate from the operation of your laptop and of course you can still find the traditional spinning hard drive and a two and a half inch form factor inside of laptop computers even though an ssd does provide better performance we tend to find larger capacities with the spinning hard drives so for the same amount of money you could store much more information on a spinning hard drive versus an ssd the storage drives and a laptop are usually accessible by removing a cover that's on the back or removing the entire back of the laptop to be able to gain access to those components these are usually relatively modular and easy to swap out you can take the cover off remove a couple of screws and then remove the drive here's the back of a typical laptop this laptop requires you to remove a number of screws from the back and you remove the entire panel of the back some laptops have a single panel that you might remove to get access to individual pieces such as the memory modules let's open this up and we'll look and see what's inside there's the laptop components we can see this is a 17-inch laptop it's relatively large it's designed to have multiple hard drives which is not really usual in a laptop but this particular model does have two separate storage devices you can see the primary processor is here along with what appears to be the graphics card and the copper is the cooling that goes to these heat sinks in the back that has a fan that helps cool everything the memory modules are stacked one right on top of each other and we've got on the bottom right a number of cards this is my wireless lan card there's a slot here for a wireless cellular card which i don't have in this laptop and then the bluetooth card the wireless pan personal area network card these storage devices and laptops are designed to be relatively easy to replace this one requires you to remove a couple of screws and then it pops out let's remove the first screw we'll remove the second screw and in this particular model you would simply lift up and remove the drive from the laptop to replace the drive you simply reverse the process push it into place add the screws and now your laptop drive is back in place just as our storage devices are smaller inside of a laptop as compared to a desktop we have the same situation with our memory modules inside of a laptop you might find a so dim and a micro dim these are small outline dual in-line memory modules or the smaller micro dual in-line memory modules these are almost exclusively used in laptops and smaller devices although some of the very very small motherboards you might find on your desktop might use microdimms or sodims as well i've zoomed in on the memory modules so we can see these a little bit better you can see there are two hooks on each side of the memory module that holds these in if we pull these hooks out the memory module pops up and we can grab them by the edges and remove the memory module from the laptop this laptop has two sets of memory modules so if we wanted to replace both of them we would do exactly the same thing now let's replace the memory modules notice that we're going to put the memory modules in with these copper contacts going all the way into that memory slot make sure they're all the way down you don't want to have them sitting out just a little bit you want to be sure that they are completely in that slot and it shouldn't take any pressure to put these in they should slide right in without any pressure at all and then you can simply push down until they snap in place now let's do this with the second memory module in this case i'm going to turn the module around you'll notice the key is on the side if you do that it will not fit into the memory module so don't force them in instead make sure the key is exactly in the place you need it to be it fits perfectly with that memory module and then you should be able to snap those in place in many high security environments you may be required to use a smart card as part of your authentication and so many laptops may include a smart card reader built into the laptop itself so when you authenticate to the network you have to slide in your smart card to be able to use that laptop if there's not a smart card reader integrated into the laptop you may have one that works externally that connects to the laptop via usb our laptops keep getting smaller and we find that optical media is being used less and less and that's why you're not able to find as many optical drives available on laptops today as you have in the past if you do find a laptop that has an optical drive very often that optical drive can be removed and then replaced with a separate storage drive or some other component if you do have an optical drive and a laptop it's nice to have one that can both read and write to these optical drives to use as a backup medium so this may be a cd rw or cd-rom or it might be the newer dvd rw or dvd rom this is all available in a portable device so that no matter where you are you're able to access or write to this optical media with many of our laptop technologies we're not connecting a physical cable into our network we're using wireless technologies and so you'll find a laptop there may be a number of different wireless cards this laptop has three separate adapter spots one for an 802. 11 wireless connection there's one that has a wan which would be a cellular based wireless connection and then a w pan the personal area network that would be the bluetooth wireless network here's a closer look at these three adapter slots you can see that there are wires connecting to each of these these are for the antennas usually that antenna wire will wrap all the way through the laptop and around the top of the lcd display you might also find different form factors for these adapter cards that you would put into a laptop for example the mini pci card is on the left and the smaller mini pci express card is on the right this laptop has a number of slots for many pci express cards and i have one for the wireless personal area network or the bluetooth card and you can see there's a spot for wpan this is the wpa in card and there's also an antenna here for bluetooth that is labeled blue to install the card we put it all the way into those slots so that we don't have any of that copper showing and then we would push it down and then this particular card has a single screw that holds it in place on the right side once that screw is down the card is installed the only thing we have to do with these cards is make sure that the antenna is also added this is a simple pressure these antennas install into the connector by pushing onto the antenna connection on the adapter so you have to get it in just the right spot and give just a little bit of pressure it doesn't take much and it snaps into place on a desktop computer the video adapter is usually built into the cpu it's a separate chip on the motherboard or it's a separate interface card that's installed in the system it's very similar situation with laptops although most of the time the video is built into the processor or it's a separate chip on the motherboard there's not enough room inside of a laptop to have a full-size video card as a separate interface card because these video adapters are part of the cpu or part of the system board they're not generally upgradable so the vast majority of laptops you find will have no ability to upgrade the video components there are some laptops though that do allow you to upgrade the video components inside of that laptop these are usually larger systems and they're built for people that need high-end graphics capabilities in a mobile platform we commonly use lcd displays on our desktop computers and we're also using lcd displays on our laptops as well these liquid crystal displays are very light and they provide a very high resolution screen these are of course very fragile because these laptops tend to be moved from place to place you want to be sure to get a laptop that is well protected whenever you're moving it from one location to another one challenge with lcds is that the resolutions are fixed on the screen you can't buy a larger screen and you can't change the resolutions of the one that exists inside the laptop so if you make changes to the native resolution you may find that the graphics and the information you're viewing on the screen are not as crisp they're a little bit fuzzy so you need to make sure you're using the native resolution to have the best possible viewing on this lcd screen our computers need direct current to be able to operate and on our desktop computers there's usually a power supply that's built into the case on laptop computers we don't have that same amount of room so usually the power conversion is done on an external device that provides dc power directly into the laptop and usually there will be a power interface this might be very different as you look at different laptop computers this one happens to be a rounded yellow connector on the back of the laptop here's an example of an external power supply that's used for a laptop this may be an auto switching laptop power supply which means you could use it on many different types of power systems or it may be fixed input this converts our ac coming from the wall into dc that can be used by the laptop computer and usually you'll see these available to run at 110 volts or 220 volts depending on where you happen to be in the world these power supplies are very specific to the make and the model of the laptop you're using so if you need to replace a power supply make sure you replace it with one that's compatible with your system it's very useful if you can decipher some of this information that's on the back of a laptop power adapter this is a power adapter from dell you can see the part number listed and the model number the input voltages on this particular power supply will support either 100 or 240 volts of ac power that's the squiggly line and it provides that at 50 or 60 hertz and inputs 2.
0 amps into this power supply this power supply will output 19. 5 volts of dc power this is the symbol for dc power which is the solid line with the dashed line underneath and it outputs 4.
