Knowledge of a Computer's Inner Workings

Why is it important to understand my computer’s hardware and boot up sequence?

Just off the top of my head.

Every component takes memory and power to run. Let’s say I will be on a flight going somewhere. My battery has only a finite amount of time that it will last before I will need to power it up again. I could create a boot disk that would only “start up” the necessary components that I will use en route to my destination, thereby allowing me to work longer – saving my battery life.

A couple of things on the knowledge of the inner workings of the components of the computer:

The whole “blue ray” technology allows more memory to be stored on the finite area of a disk. To my understanding, blue has a smaller wavelength than red and therefore uses less space. I believe the next big thing could be ultraviolet lasers to store and read memory. Ultraviolet has an even smaller wavelength than blue. Does the color of the ray need to be in the visible spectrum?

Quite possibly the resolution of the latest cameras have gotten too good and consequently causes the digital files to take a lot of memory. This might cause someone to try to upload files that take an incredible amount of time, when the resolution that they took their pictures at was overkill. This happened to me last night. I watched my computer try to upload a file that was 111 MB, that’s right 111 Million Bytes. This took over 2 hours. When it was done the location to which I was uploading said the file was too big. I don’t know why it didn’t tell me as the 2 hours started and not when it was done. This may not have the most to do with the inner workings of my computer, but it is on my mind now. Thankfully I have a wife who knows quite a bit about imaging software and she was able to scale down the sizes of my pictures, thus making the powerpoint presentation smaller and “uploadable”. Consequently, I was able to get my assignment done on time. A little more knowledge about the relative sizes of files is now in my memory bank…