Displays
Slots
VESA (ISA extended)
PCI
AGP (4 versions)
PCIX (CAD/medical)
PCIe
Connectors
VGA
S-video
Component and Composite
DVI (-A, -D and -I)
DisplayPort (full and mini)
HDMI
Technologies
CRT
Plasma
Color wheel
LCD (TN, IPS)
CCFL backlights
LED backlights
OLED
Resolutions
VGA – 640×480
SVGA – 800×600
XGA
Essentials of Networking
If you’re doing my CompTIA courses, you’ll hear me mention IEEE often. You should be aware of their site and what they do on it. It’s pretty damn interesting:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-institute
(Thanks Herbbie!)
Client / Server Model
Hosts (Clients)
Servers (either physical machines or service daemons, like web servers, mail servers, streaming servers, etc.)
Local Area Networks (LANs)
Physical Layer (think of telegraph wire)
Wire
Fiber optic cable
Radio waves
Ethernet Cable
Unshielded Twisted Pair (UTP)
Shielded Twisted Pair (STP)
Plenum vs PVC Cable
Cat 3 – 10 Mbps, 100 meters max
Cat 5 – 100 Mbps, 100 meters max
Cat 5e – 1000 Mbps, 100 meters max
Cat 6 – 10 Gbps, but only 55 meters
Cat 6a – 10 Gbps, 100 meters max
Fiber Optic Cable
LEDs vs Lasers
Single-mode vs Multi-mode
Coaxial Cable
Ethernet Thicknet or Thinnet Co-ax (uses BNC connectors)
Cable TV/Internet Service Co-ax (uses screw-in F-type connectors
Signal Protocols (think of Morse Code)
Ethernet, Token Ring, DECnet, X.25, etc.
Today, mostly Ethernet
Ethernet passes frames. (You could call them packets, but the other kids on the playground will make fun of you.)
Ethernet cards are NICs (network interface cards, also called “host adapters”).
NICs have “permanent” hardware addresses (Physical Addresses in Windows): MAC Addresses.

Mac Addresses are written in hexadecimal (base 10 notation, using 0-9 and A-F to express numbers from 0-15)
Hex numbers look like this:
0f38 # or
0x0f38 # or
0f38h
Topologies
Bus Topology
Ring Topology
Ring: Token Ring
Star Topology
Mesh Topology
Mesh: Full vs Partial Mesh
Hybrid Topology
Structured Cabling
Telecom room
Work area
Equipment racks: 19″ wide, 1.75″ U (height units)
Patch panels
Punchdown tools
Crimpers
Cable testers
Textbook Time
Token_ringChapters 17 and 18