Miscellaneous Terms
Ethernet - This is the type of network cable you use to connect a computer to your one of your gateway's ports or a switch port.
Interface - Very generically, it is any logical of physical connection between two different systems or between disparate pieces of hardware. But it is as simple as this; when you plug the network cable into your PC, you've just made a connection on the PC's network interface.
Port - In the physical computer world, it's anything that can be plugged into by some type of computer related cable, an outlet if you will. There are also logical ports that data trasmissions use communicating amongst different pieces of equipment on the network.
ASR - Automated System Recovery is a built-in utility in Windows XP that allows you to back up your system settings and create a floppy drive that the system can use to boot to that configuration settings backup you just created. This is only used when the computer is no longer usable or otherwise cannot boot up to the OS level. Insert your ASR diskette and restore the configuration file you created when your created the floppy disk.
Defrag - Files are written to disk in an non-sequential, broken manner due to the nature of the hard drive and how data is written to free space first. Ultimately, the hard drive can become so fragmented, it slows down your computer just trying to locate a file. Run the Defragmentation utility and put all those words and sentences back together so to speak to take the burden off of your PC from doing every time you are pulling up files.
System Tray - The small bottom, right corner of your Windows toolbar where the time is located is the System Tray and it holds some open and running items you have on your PC.
