I don't think there's anything wrong with referring to the entire case as the CPU. That is what's in there. Granted there's more but I don't think it's on the level of "TV" for monitor.

my dell demenson has 40gb memory and a 128 bit's ati pentium 2ghz!!!

leileilol wrote:

my dell demenson has 40gb memory and a 128 bit's ati pentium 2ghz!!!

You know 129 bits is the minimum these days? Get with it.

What really irks me is when people get memory and storage mixed up. The fact that advertisers have started doing this as well only serves to make things worse. Memory = RAM, the memory your programs and data are loaded into to be worked with, storage = where your programs and data are stored in the first place. It seems pretty simple to explain, but many people do not "get" it.

It's certainly not correct to call a computer tower/desktop/box a 'CPU', but at the same time I wouldn't say it's unreasonable to do so. I mean, it is, after all, the central unit that does the processing. It would've made even more sense back in the '80s, when all the drives and expansions and such tended to be externally attached boxes themselves... hell, on some of the old mainframe systems, the CPU (in the traditional sense of the term) basically was a separate box, and all your interfaces and even the memory were in separate enclosures.

At least when people call it a CPU, you know what they're talking about. What I find unforgivable is the fucktards that call it a 'modem'. Those are usually the same ones that call the monitor the 'computer'. And they inevitably also have an actual modem, which they often don't even recognize as being a related piece of equipment. It makes troubleshooting over the phone pretty much impossible.

I also love those people that are like: "OMG my GPU has 2GB of VRAM, it rocks so hard".

[ROTT] IanPaulFreeley wrote:

However I recently saw in an old music magazine from the 80's a picture of Chick Corea's synth setup at the time, and the computer tower was labeled the "CPU". I also caught someone use the term in this way in an episode of The Computer Chronicles. (Trying to find the episode where I heard this.)

I'd say that calling the computer tower a "CPU" is a valid case of metonymy, although it would be interesting to know if this was supported by widespread usage in the 80s.

BY the same logic, it's supposedly normal to call a laptop computer a "CPU" as well, but intuitively this just feels weird.

On the other hand, the examples you came across could have been a result of someone trying to use special terms to appear being "in the know".

F2bnp wrote:

I also love those people that are like: "OMG my GPU has 2GB of VRAM, it rocks so hard".

Most people who are in the current generation hardware and games are usually the ones who know the least. Noobs in general clog up places like THG and spam xbit ect. Wish that it wasn't like that but reading through can be annoying when there are a dozen replies to each thread with no proper answer or solution to the person asking for help. I find it amazing how so many couldn't pick out an induction coil on a graphics card let alone find anything else. The fanboys these days are wimpy at best.

I'm sure I recall books labelling the box as the CPU back in the early/mid-eighties. May even have been perpetrated by courses I went on at the time. May be slightly before the ibm-pc, in the days when when it was common to refer to "microcomputers".

Yeah I'd say "CPU" is OK, but I know an old bloke who calls the box a "modem". That guy is really in struggle town.

What really gets my goat is people who abuse their PC's and then come to me to fix it. My brother in law dropped off his "CPU" the other day because it just wasn't working right, turns out he'd just filled his HDD to the brim with pirated TV shows.

I remember when i was younger :

I have an Pentium 4 XP 1GB!

and there was that "I lived in the 90s, I had a 486 with 256mb RAM" post not that long ago on this board...

nforce4max wrote:

F2bnp wrote:

I also love those people that are like: "OMG my GPU has 2GB of VRAM, it rocks so hard".

Most people who are in the current generation hardware and games are usually the ones who know the least. Noobs in general clog up places like THG and spam xbit ect. Wish that it wasn't like that but reading through can be annoying when there are a dozen replies to each thread with no proper answer or solution to the person asking for help. I find it amazing how so many couldn't pick out an induction coil on a graphics card let alone find anything else. The fanboys these days are wimpy at best.

Nah it's been like that all the time. Remember all those people with GeForce 4 MX and FX 5200 cards, complaining that they had 128MB VRAM? 😁

I know a lot of people who call the computer a CPU. It's a running joke amongst some of my friends 😀

Or they call it hard drive. That's also funny.

leileilol wrote:

and there was that "I lived in the 90s, I had a 486 with 256mb RAM" post not that long ago on this board...

I have two 486 boards here from 1993 that can take 256MB of RAM. It would have been hideously expensive, but it certainly was possible at the time.

Possible, but extremely improbable.

Terminology is what really confuses people who aren't computer literate. My experience has been that when a person doesn't know how to properly refer to a component of their computer, or the computer as a whole, they just throw out words that seem like they make sense when describing their problems.

Common synonyms amongst the computer illiterate:

Desktop = Screen = Display = Background = Bottom = Thing

Window = Box = Program = Thing

Hard Drive = Memory = RAM = Disk = Computer = System = Device = Here

Icon = Graphic = Picture = Little Thing

File = Image = Text = Words = Item = Thing

And of course, whenever someone says they get an error message, they NEVER tell you what the error message says, and if they do, they throw in all their synonyms. x_x;

All that said though... I've never personally encountered anyone who called their entire system the "CPU"... :o

Well the last time I mentioned (here) how wrong is it to call an ISA VGA card as "GPU", I got censored.

So there's that.

You weren't censored for that. Your posts of "get out" were, however...