Power Supply The power supply, or PSU, is where the computer gets its electrical power from. All power supllies are rated by the amount of watts it produces. Most consumers don't have to worry about the amount of watts, unless you have power supplies that keep shorting out. High-end machines that use high-end video cards and other powered devices need to worry about not having enough power since too little power can have an effect on performance in those types of machines. A power supply can go bad however, in any computer no matter if it's high-end or not. A failing power supply can be hard to detect because it can affect any one piece of hardware while not others. Power supplies give off several different voltages bacause different hardware devices require different amounts power, thus having too little power that effects only one of the different voltages may affect only one device. Although a failing power supply is easy to check, it can be difficult to diagnose without the machine physically present, or without a PSU tester. If you think that a power supply is causing problems then it may be worth simply replacing it because of the problems it can cause other devices. Also, a PSU is going to be realtively cheap when compared to a hard drive or motherboard.

Optical Drive An optical drive is any drive which uses a laser to read and/or write data to/from an optical disk. CD, DVD, CD/RW, DVD/RW and Blu-ray are all types of optical drives. Although having one is not a necessity of a computer system, it sure helps when loading programs or an operating system onto the computer. Roughly 99% of computers have some type of optical drive installed (whether they all work or not is different story). Unlike other hardware devices mentioned earlier, an optical drive has no effect on the speed of the computer. CD drives are able to read CDs only. DVD drives are able to read DVDs and CDs. CD/RW drives can both read and write CDs, while a DVD/RW can read and write both CDs and DVDs. Blu-ray drives are raltively new to the market, but most should be able to read and write to all three types of disks. Blu-ray disks can hold up to 50GB worth of data compared to a DVD whaich can only hold 4.8GB. Blu-ray gots its name from the blue-violet laser that is used, instead of the traditional red one in CD and DVD drives.

Case Computer cases come in many different shapes and sizes. The case has only two purposes, to provide a place to hold the hardware and two provide enough airflow to keep the processor cool. That's it. Nothing more. A case has no bearing on the speed of the computer at all. A case is a case. Of course that won't stop someone on spending hundreds of dollars on a case that looks cool.

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