Tips for Understanding (and Messing With) Your IT Guy

If you work in an office setting or ever find yourself having to deal with computer tech support, you've no doubt had to suffer through the painfully technical explanations of your computer's nether regions, using words you're pretty sure are made up on the spot, all just to explain why your favorite website won't load.

As it happens, the gibberish oozing out of their mouth like diarrhea does in fact have meaning, and it's actually not that hard to understand; it just takes a little patience. What follows is a guide to understanding tech-speak; to being able to ask intelligent questions of your IT professional and maybe, just maybe, some ways to mess with them and keep them on their toes.

This list isn't complete, not by a long shot. It's just a couple things to help you overcome your fear of computers. Other possible topics include Number Systems (binary, hexadecimal, etc), Networking, etc.

First, let's start off with some definitions. It is not necessary to memorize these, but you should try to understand them.

Data Storage

Bit - one binary digit, 1 or 0

Byte - 8 bits

Nibble - 4 bits. (Half a word, get it? HAHAHA! Come on folks, this is as good as it gets) Not commonly used, but it'll still pop up every now and again. No, I didn't just make it up.

Kilobyte, or 'kB' - 1024 bits. No, it's not 1000, like in kilogram, kilometer, etc. In fact, it's not metric at all. It follows the binary number system, so everything goes in powers of two (whereas the decimal system you know and love/hate goes in powers of 10). The nearest power of 2 to 1000 is 1024, so they called it a 'Kilobyte', commonly referred to as a 'k'.

Megabyte, or 'MB' - 1,048,576 bits, or approximately 1 million bits. Again, the closest power of 2 to one million. Simple version: Mega = Million

Gigabyte, or 'GB' - 1,073,741,824 bytes, or approximately 1 billion bytes. Again, the closest power of 2 to one billion. Simple version: Giga = Billion