Basic Computer Information

Some basic info to improve your computer literacy:

·         An Internet Service Provider will allow your home computer to connect to the internet and get online information. A broadband connection is a high-speed connection to the internet. Internet Service and/or a broadband connection is needed to transfer data to and from your doctor’s office or the cloud (see below).  Having wireless access means your computer or personal device can use the internet without being plugged in to the router used to provide your internet service.

·         A browser is a computer program used to view and interact with webpages on the internet. Microsoft’s Windows Internet Explorer/Edge, Google’s Chrome, and Mozilla’s Firefox are three examples of commonly used browsers.

·         Random access memory (RAM) is where a computer stores the information it is currently using. The computer stores permanent information on the hard drive. The more data the computer is currently using the more RAM is required to hold that data. When the RAM is full, the computer performs caching of some of the RAM data to the hard drive. Caching means to save the data. This temporarily frees up space in RAM for other tasks. Hard drive access is much slower than RAM access which means that if the computer doesn’t have a lot of RAM, it spends more time moving data not required for the current task to and from the hard drive.

·         Cloud computing is using the internet for storing information instead of the computer’s hard drive. Microsoft OneDrive, Apple’s iCloud, and most of Google’s services like Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Maps all use cloud technology by storing their data online.
      You could use a spreadsheet program, like Google Sheets, that is stored online to record blood glucose readings or daily health information. That way, if you are not at home with your personal computer you can still upload your information and send it to your physician. This is also a good idea if you’re worried about the storage capacity of your personal computer’s hard drive.