LINE NOISE: This is pops, buzzes, clicks, or other random noise that happens on a phone line. During conversation, you don't notice line noise. But when a modem uses the phone line, the line noise may often be misinterpreted as a signal from the other computer. The result is often garbage characters on the screen.

For example: "There is so much line noise that my modem can't communicate. Oh, no wonder -- 10,000 birds just landed on the phone lines outside my house."

SECONDARY CACHE: This is cache memory that is on the motherboard rather than inside a microprocessor. Also called L2 cache memory, secondary cache memory dramatically improves system performance and is essential to every computer system.

Several kinds of secondary cache memory are available, ranging from the slow but inexpensive direct-map cache to fast and expensive four-way set-associative cache. Write-back secondary cache memory is better than write-through secondary cache memory.

Information supplied by www.ottimo.co.uk

December 12, 2001 17:00