I don’t use smart terminology to confuse you or try to make myself look smarter than what I really am. Many computer and tech words have different meanings, but here is a list of a few that seem to gets mixed up a lot.

Optical Drive

An optical drive in your computer is a device which users lasers and lights to read and store the information to a disk. Optical drives can include a cd-rom drive (Compact Disc Read-Only Memory), a DVD (Digital Video Disk) and Bl Ray Disk.

If you have a burner, you can buy blank disks of your desired format and make your own CD’s or DVD’s to listen and watch,

Freeware

Freeware is software which is free. You do not have to pay for it, but you usually can not modify and sell and distribute it either without the permission of the author.

Shareware

Shareware is similar to freeware and is usually initially free for public release with the intent and hope the users will further share it as well. If you have ever downloaded a software package from a website which wasn’t the author, it was probably shareware.

URL

Url stands for Uniform Resource Locator and is the address you type into your web browser or internet software to access a site. Such as, https://townsvillenerds.com.

GUI

A Graphical User Interface is a way for a human to interact with the computer. Using the mouse people are able to access menu’s and icons to display options, execute programs and run commands.

Without GUI’s we would pretty much have to type in everything we wanted to do via a black screen with white writing, rather than quickly clicking on it.

Driver

A driver is a small piece of software on your computer that makes the magic of your computer communicating with its physical devices for you.

Most manufactures of hardware make available their drivers to be downloaded via their website and if for some reason a device like a printer is not working you can some download and install the latest driver for it to hopefully fix it.

HomePage

A common misconception is that a homepage is your website. Although it is close, a home page is on your website, we are generally referring to your homepage as the page most people will land on or (the introductory page) of your website.

Download/Upload

Download is when you transfer data from a device or computer to yours, and uploading is transfer from your computer to another. You can download something from the internet, over the network or from a disk etc.