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ADSL
Asymmetric Digital Subscribers Line
This is a connection using telephone lines that provide the customer with fast download and upload speeds. It is basically your internet connection and is also known as Broadband.
The speed of these connections is constantly increasing as the technology developes.
How it works is that it splits your telephone line in to two individual channels enabling one channel for standard voice communication and the secondary channel for data transfer usage so that you can use your laptops for surfing the internet and email..
This multi-frequency communication is achieved by placing a splitter on your existing phone line.
The great advantage of ADSL Broadband is that you can use the internet and make/receive telephone calls at the same time.
AGP
Accelerated Graphics Port
This is an interface which has been developed by intel which allows the Laptops and PC’s graphics cards to directly access memory. What this means is that when using graphical and design applications and playing games on your laptop the graphics card will perform all the graphical calculations for it freeing up a lot of the Laptops system memory and processing power.
This results in an improved performance all round.
AGP graphic cards are now quickly replacing the older PCI ones due to the superior performance.
ASCII
American Standard Code for Information Interchange
This is an encoding system that is widely used and represents characters with numbers (0 to 127) using a 7 bit code.
There are also extensions of ASCII which utilise 8 bit codes when using international characters.
AVI
Audio Video Interleaved
This is a file format similar to MP4 and DIVX which contains multimedia content, mainly video. Both the video and audio elements are interleaved in alternative segments within the AVI file.
This format is widely used across the internet as a means of video distribution because of the reasonable quality and speed of downloading.
You can easily download AVI files and play them on Laptops is you have compatible software such as widows media player and an internet connection.
ASP
Active Server Pages
Not to be confused with the association of surfing professionals (the water type of surfing) ASP is basically a webpage that has dynamic content on it (as opposed to just static html) such as java scripts, databases or form handlers.
This technology allows web developers using their Laptops to create dynamic web pages through the use of activeX.
ASP is sometimes also known as Application Service Provider.
ActiveX
This is a technology developed by Microsoft that enhances interactive control and content in web browsers and other network orientated interactive software applications.
It basically enables sounds, animations and java applets to be integrated into a web page.
ACPI
Advanced Configuration Power Interface
Developed by Microsoft, Toshiba and Intel it refers to a power management specification. This allows your Laptops operating system such as windows to control the distribution of power to its peripherals such as it’s hard drive and processor. This technology was originally developed for Laptops where power saving management is very important.
ACPI (Advanced Configuration Power Management) also allows your Laptops operating system to communicate with is BIOS system and can instruct this system to shut off power to certain peripherals when your Laptop enters hibernation for example.
ALU
Arithmetic Logic Unit
This is the part of the Laptops processor that calculates all the logical and mathematical processes for example multiplying / adding binary units.
Attachment
An attachment is the name given to a file that is attached to an email such as a photo, document, mp3 file etc.
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