Dell PowerEdge XK946 Hardware Owner's Manual page 178

NVRAM — Nonvolatile random-access memory. Memory that does not lose its
contents when you turn off your system. NVRAM is used for maintaining the date,
time, and system configuration information.
— Redundant information that is associated with a block of data.
P A R I T Y
— You can divide a hard drive into multiple physical sections called
P A R T I T I O N
partitions with the fdisk command. Each partition can contain multiple logical drives.
You must format each logical drive with the format command.
P CI — Peripheral Component Interconnect. A standard for local-bus
implementation.
P DU — Power distribution unit. A power source with multiple power outlets that
provides electrical power to servers and storage systems in a rack.
peripheral
An internal or external device, such as a diskette drive or keyboard, connected to a
system.
P GA — Pin grid array. A type of processor socket that allows you to remove the
processor chip.
— A single point on a video display. Pixels are arranged in rows and columns to
P I X E L
create an image. A video resolution, such as 640 x 480, is expressed as the number of
pixels across by the number of pixels up and down.
P OS T — Power-on self-test. Before the operating system loads when you turn on your
system, the POST tests various system components such as RAM and hard drives.
— The primary computational chip inside the system that controls the
P R O C E S S O R
interpretation and execution of arithmetic and logic functions. Software written for
one processor must usually be revised to run on another processor. CPU is a synonym
for processor.
— An operating mode that allows operating systems to implement
P R O T E C T E D M O D E
a memory address space of 16 MB to 4 GB, multitasking, and virtual memory—a
method for increasing addressable memory by using the hard drive. The Windows
2000 and UNIX 32-bit operating systems run in protected mode. MS-DOS cannot run
in protected mode.
P S/ 2 — Personal System/2.
P XE — Preboot eXecution Environment. A way of booting a system via a LAN
(without a hard drive or bootable diskette).
R AC — Remote access controller.
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Glossary