Your PC, your computer, whether Mac or IBM PC compatible or an old TRS 80 from ancient times is essentially a simulated personal office. There is considerable mis-information or disinformation or just plain old confusion regarding the various parts of your computer and how they work. Thinking of your PC as a simulated office is a great analogy for understanding this simple tool that we all seem to be using these days.

The home office consists of such things as: A Filing Cabinet, A Desk with Drawers, "in" and "out" boxes, A Desk Blotter, a Whiteboard or Chalkboard, Pens, Pencils and Paper; Bulletin Board.
Each one of these components has a comparable counterpart in the computer world. Let's just list some of these items and show what their high-tech equivalent is:

Filing Cabinet Hard Drive or Hard Disk Drive.
Desk Motherboard.
Desktop RAM memory.
Scratch Paper/Blotter Cache Memory.
Pen/Pencil Buss or Front Side Buss

You would enter your office, possibly sitting down at the desk. This is equivalent to booting up your PC - turning it's power on. When you click on a desktop icon, or otherwise, start an application which is already installed on your PC, this is like going over to filing cabinet, opening a drawer and pulling out a file folder, going back to your desk, sitting down and opening this file folder. As the day wears on, you may open several file folders, placing them on your desk in different locations. Now here, the physical size of your desktop is just like RAM memory because, if your desk is small you won't be able to place as many file folders on its surface without becoming cluttered and inefficient. You can only increase the size of your desk as the room will allow. It's the same with the RAM memory: your various PC model has a maximum amount of RAM that can be installed inside. This RAM memory, just like the surface of your desk, usually becomes fairly cluttered during the day, as you work on various projects. Before you leave your office, you typically return the file folders to the filing cabinet, leaving your desktop free for the next days use. Now, if you were to leave the office abruptly, with your work open in place about the desk, i.e. not clear off your desk after work; this is equivalent to leaving applications running on your PC. It's probably safe to do, unless somebody has to use your PC for something, or the power fails. A power failure might be equivalent to having the cleaners come in at

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