Computer Science Vs Computer Engineering

BaRcOe

Which prepares you better if you want to build your own p.c and the likes...

Computer Science or Computer Engineering?

uberpixie

BaRcOe wrote: »

Which prepares you better if you want to build your own p.c and the likes...

Computer Science or Computer Engineering?

Neither.

PC building is a "technicians job" they generally don't teach that sort of thing on degree course as it is beneath them :-)

You want to learn how to build a PC? Go read, mess about with old PCs, then buy some parts andbuild yourself.

DIY brother.

aidan_walsh

Also consider taking a look into courses like the CompTIA A+.

April Raine

aidan_walsh wrote: »

Also consider taking a look into courses like the CompTIA A+.

This may sound like a silly question but do you have to be able to understand electricity and electronics and computer language to do this? I would like to be able to repair pc's as part time job. What course is best for that

JackKelly

April Raine wrote: »

This may sound like a silly question but do you have to be able to understand electricity and electronics and computer language to do this? I would like to be able to repair pc's as part time job. What course is best for that

While I can't recommend a course for you, as someone already metioned, you'll learn far more then any course can teach you by just messing about with PC's yourself. Take them apart, learn what part does what, break them and fix them!

uberpixie

April Raine wrote: »

This may sound like a silly question but do you have to be able to understand electricity and electronics and computer language to do this? I would like to be able to repair pc's as part time job. What course is best for that

Would you have to be able to understand astronomy to repair telescopes....?:D

To do troubleshooting and standard building and sorting out of PCs you can either do an A+ as suggested: there are various technician courses that will teach you basics and playing around with old hardware on top of that wil start you of nicely.

(Actually building your own pc after a lot of research will teach you the most)

You do not have to know anything about electronics/programming to build pcs. These are totally different areas.

BoB_BoT

a+ is good for grounding yourself in the basics, the best way to learn to repair a pc, is to repair a pc It's almost impossible to know every little detail about computers, so in most cases you'll rely on experience, other peoples experience and communities/forums (i.e. boards )

If you've no experience with PC hardware, the a+ is the way to go, but it helps to have a pc to practice on. Personally, I got into computer repairs because my first pc kept breaking, thank you packard bell :P It takes a while to get the hang of it, but essentially it all comes down to trial and error. Test this, test that, if it doesn't work, try something else etc...

When doing repairs part time (as a nixer) be very careful, it's one thing to do it for a friend/family member, but when you start calling out to peoples houses, or taking their pc's you'll have to be careful, otherwise it comes out of your pocket. If you want to do it professionally, get certified, that piece of paper is your get out of jail free card. "I know what I'm doing, I have a piece of paper that says so" :P

But most importantly, remember this, don't **** with electricity. It's one thing to get a shock from a DC source, much more dangerous from an AC. If you don't know what you're doing, don't touch it, especially if it's a risk to you or the customer.

Tom Dunne

uberpixie wrote: »

Neither.

PC building is a "technicians job" they generally don't teach that sort of thing on degree course as it is beneath them :-)

That's not true. Any computer degree course, be it engineering, science or information technology will have an element of digital and possibly analogue electronics in it. Which in itself will entail hands-on labs that involve building electronic circuits.

uberpixie wrote: »

You want to learn how to build a PC? Go read, mess about with old PCs, then buy some parts andbuild yourself.

DIY brother.

Couldn't agree more. However, as above, any course that involves the internals of computers should have an element of hands-on exposure.

I had a group of students simply disassemble and re-assemble a computer in a lab last year and I was taken aback at the amount positive feedback. They said they learned more in that two hours than they could have from any book.

Yarnhall

Electronics with an IT angle to the the theory and some DIY builds.

SouperComputer

Buliding a PC is pi$$ easy. Showed my wife how to do it in about 20mins. The part that requires knowledge is knowing what parts go with what, bus types, ram types etc etc. Any of this info is easy to get on the web, and its not in any way hard, it will just take you some time to absorb the terminology. Its a lot easier to slap a PC together than an Apple I, put it that way.

The other part, is troubleshooting when things go wrong. Get your hands on a KVM switch and some older PC's, play around and maybe do the A+ to get a handle on the basics. Although if there is a local course at a college\tech covering PC repair, id reccomend that over A+.

You could also buy parts from people on adverts.ie and build a computer. You'll learn a fair bit from that, and you can always ask the seller if what they are selling will work with X. Its always best to do your own research though

BobBot wrote:

But most importantly, remember this, don't **** with electricity. It's one thing to get a shock from a DC source, much more dangerous from an AC. If you don't know what you're doing, don't touch it, especially if it's a risk to you or the customer.

Rubbish, AC or DC isn't relevant and im guessing you havnt worked on a lot of cars.: "AC or DC, 'It's Volts that jolts, but Mills that kill'". A lot of DC applications are low voltage, which feeds said myth.

Lazarus2.0

+1 for the DIY approach . I'd been messing about with ( errm...fixing) my PC for quite a few years and took the A+ last year after being forced to retire from construction . It was a FAS course (20 weeks !!) which basically involved reading Mike Meyers Comptia A+ tome (cant remember the exact title) . Precious little hands on experience - more a case of passing round a stick of RAM and saying 'This is memory" , etc ; with a couple of networking sessions thrown in .
So in hindsight I already had the knowledge borne of experience to sail through the exams but I will say that doing the course certainly educated me . Whereas I would know most of the basic fixes and be able to narrow down likely causes of error I wouldnt necessarily have been able to say why a given fix worked - just that it probably would . So the excess of information was helpful in that sense but it only came from reading a book and avidly reading tech support forums .
Much cheaper and more effective to buy a cheapo PC on adverts and add/remove cheapo components than to pay for a course that will teach you little you didnt already know .

April Raine

Thanks for the info

BoB_BoT wrote: »

If you want to do it professionally, get certified, that piece of paper is your get out of jail free card. "I know what I'm doing, I have a piece of paper that says so" :P

Where do you get certified and how does that protect you? Would you be insured in case something went wrong?

BoB_BoT

SouperComputer wrote: »

Rubbish, AC or DC isn't relevant and im guessing you havnt worked on a lot of cars.: "AC or DC, 'It's Volts that jolts, but Mills that kill'". A lot of DC applications are low voltage, which feeds said myth.

nope, never worked on cars, and yes I know millivolts can kill, but as you know yourself it all depends on the conditions. i.e. sweaty, water involved, an open wound, for lower voltages in the milliamps to kill or cause damage they generally need a path to the heart etc...

I admit I'm not correct with my ac / dc comparision, but doesn't ac generally have a higher current than dc in practical uses?

April Raine wrote: »

Thanks for the info
Where do you get certified and how does that protect you? Would you be insured in case something went wrong?

Certification is via whichever company you go for, be it Comptia (a+) or Cisco (similar course and cert), it does not provide insurance, I'm referring to if someone accuses you of being a cowboy, or chancing your arm, that you're not "qualified" with a piece of paper etc... Not even sure if you could get insurance if you messed up someone's pc. I've only ever had one incident with someone, what they meant by "wipe my computer and put it back to what it was like when we bought it" actually was "back up all the data on my hard drive, especially those pictures I havn't backed up of our last trip". Spent hours recovering data. ****ers didn't want to pay for the work, despite I do recall asking them was there anything that needed to have backed up. I started using worksheets after that, wrote down what people wanted, got them to sign it. Solves that problem from happening again.

April Raine

Seen Comp TIA+ courses varying from a year to ten weeks at an hour a week. Are there different levels?

BoB_BoT

the A+ can be done in a month, but that's working at it for about 4-6 hours a day. It's easily done in 3 months at leisure, the 10 week version may be full time, the 1 year, spreading it out over the evenings. The A+ is two exams, the essentials exam and the IT Technician exam. There are other A+ areas you can go for, Depot Technician and Remote Technician, the Depot Technician specialises in bench repairs and Remote Technician is aimed at help desk/remote help (logging into the users computer and taking control). I'm not sure if you can go straight for those as your main exam, or if you have to get the basic A+ first.

Lazarus2.0

The A+ exams come as a pair . Esssentials and another of your choice from IT Tech , Remote (Support) Tech and Depot Tech (workshop) . They explain it better than I ever could ... http://certification.comptia.org/a/default.aspx

Jonathan

BoB_BoT wrote: »

nope, never worked on cars, and yes I know millivolts can kill, but as you know yourself it all depends on the conditions. i.e. sweaty, water involved, an open wound, for lower voltages in the milliamps to kill or cause damage they generally need a path to the heart etc...

I admit I'm not correct with my ac / dc comparision, but doesn't ac generally have a higher current than dc in practical uses?

No. The dart runs off 1500V DC. Doesn't matter what the conditions are, sweaty hands and wounds or not, 1500V DC will still kill you.

This thread has nothing to do with computer science or computer engineering. How do i become a pc repair technician would have been a better title.

Lazarus2.0

jmccrohan wrote: »

No. The dart runs off 1500V DC. Doesn't matter what the conditions are, sweaty hands and wounds or not, 1500V DC will still kill you.

This thread has nothing to do with computer science or computer engineering. How do i become a pc repair technician would have been a better title.

QED

uberpixie

Tom Dunne wrote: »

That's not true. Any computer degree course, be it engineering, science or information technology will have an element of digital and possibly analogue electronics in it. Which in itself will entail hands-on labs that involve building electronic circuits.

Not when I went to UL and did my Comp science degree there.

There was a very basic overview of computers gven in 1st year, basic computer history, terminology etc. Light and fluffy stuff no huge detail.

No real practical work, we were shown the inside of an old pc once.
No classes on how to build/repair pcs etc.
Never covered electronics, they did in IT and Computer Engineering courses.

We were also told this kind of thing was a "technicans job" and had no place on a computer science course by a lecturer.

In all honesty to do computer science you do not need to know all the nitty gritty of building a pc etc..

Edsger Dijkstra stated, "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."

This is a fair point! After all if you were training to be an astronomer, I'm sure you spend your time learning about the stars and lots theory with practical time spend studying things the stars through a telescope than how to make and repair telescopes.
(making and repairing of telescopes is a technicians job)

BoB_BoT

jmccrohan wrote: »

No. The dart runs off 1500V DC. Doesn't matter what the conditions are, sweaty hands and wounds or not, 1500V DC will still kill you.

This thread has nothing to do with computer science or computer engineering. How do i become a pc repair technician would have been a better title.

I was saying that with reference to smaller voltages and current, not with such a high voltage.

evil-monkey

April Raine wrote: »

Thanks for the info
Where do you get certified and how does that protect you? Would you be insured in case something went wrong?

that's a joke right??

April Raine

evil-monkey wrote: »

that's a joke right??

wrong see post 7

If you want to do it professionally, get certified, that piece of paper is your get out of jail free card. "I know what I'm doing, I have a piece of paper that says so"

That is is what i was responding to

aidan_walsh

It shows that you have requesite skills, it doesn't provide you with any insurance against anything that might go wrong.

April Raine

aidan_walsh wrote: »

It shows that you have requesite skills, it doesn't provide you with any insurance against anything that might go wrong.

OK post 7 gave me the impression it did provide insurance. What would the situsation if a repair person did ruin a computer? Is there insurance against it or does he have to pay? Under consumer law he would have to have the skills needed to take on and do the job but that is a bit vague. Thanks;)

BoB_BoT

yup and post 13 cleared that up