An Introduction to Your Aspire
15
14
Note:
All of the information you save on your hard drive takes up
space, so you will want to clean it up p eriodically to maintain the best
performance.
Refer to My Aspire Guide for more information on scanning and ana-
lyzing the information on your hard drive.
Using Your Floppy Drive
Floppy disks are used for putting data into your computer or
for taking it out.
1 •
Insert the floppy disk into the drive, as shown. (The metal
circle on the disk’s underside should be facing down.)
2 •
Push it in gently until it pops into place.
3 •
Remove the floppy disk by pressing the eject button.
The advantage of a f loppy
disk or CD is that it makes
data portable.
Practically all newly pur-
chased software comes in
one of these two formats.
Data is often exchanged
between computers on
floppy disks. Be aware that
there is an inherent danger
of virus infection in casual
swapping or sharing of
floppy disks with your
friends and associates. Files,
applications or programs
downloaded from the
Internet also carry possible
danger. Refer to page 30 for
more information.
Why Disks?
(Or Discs, For
that Matter...)
The Floppy Drive
This drive uses removable 3.5-inch floppy disks and is called the
A: drive.
The CD-ROM Drive
The CD ROM drive uses CDs (Compact Discs) instead of f lop-
py disks, and it is Read Only Memory, which means that the
computer can read data from the disc, but cannot write any-
thing new on it. It is typically called the D: drive. On some
computers, the CD-ROM may be another drive letter. Please
refer to My Computer for the current drive letter assignment
on your Windows Me desktop.
The DVD-ROM Drive
The DVD-ROM (Digital Versatile Disc or Digital Video Disc
Read Only Memory) is a new type of CD-ROM. It can hold
capacities ranging from 4.7 GB to a maximum if 17 GB, and can
support access rates from 600 Kilobytes per second to 1.2
Megabytes per second. It is backward-compatible with CD-
ROMs which means that DVD players can play not only DVD-
ROMs, but old CD-ROMs, CD-I di sks, video CDs, and CD-R
disks as well. DVD uses MPEG-2 to compress video data.
CD-ROM/
DVD-ROM
Drive
Floppy Drive and
Hard Drive
