Type of Computers

There are four basic types of computers: PC (Personal Computer), Workstations, Laptops, Servers.
The PC, or Personal Computer, is the most common category of computers. This category would include your home PCs and most of your business class PCs.
A workstation is a breed of computer which is a high performance version of the PC. Workstation manufacturers took many of the high speed and high availability components normally found in servers and created a workstation PC which is a high performance version of the original. Throughout the rest of this tutorial, you will find the word PC and the word workstation used interchangeably, while technically there is a difference, we will begin using “workstation” now as a word to describe a PC since the two are in the same basic category.
Laptops are portable computers. Originally, laptops were large, heavy, short battery life beasts. Nowadays, laptops (also referred to as notebooks) are light, powerful, have good battery life, and serve as a desktop replacement for many individuals (including myself).
A server is a machine developed to allow for file or print serving, application hosting, or some other task usually involving many simultaneous connections. Common features of servers include redundancy, multiple drives, large amounts of memory, multiple processors.
PDAs
A Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) is a commonplace item in many businesses and homes. Spurred by the success of Palm Pilots, the PDA industry has had tremendous growth in the past few years.
A PDA is a device which allows an individual to keep their notes, email, schedule, small documents, and other information with them at all times. It is a useful device for record keeping and usually syncs with your computer to allow your contact list and emails to be "in sync" with each other in your handheld and normal computers.
Palm Pilots are the most prevalent PDAs on the market, with a market share of about 30%.
Most PDAs are based on either the Palm operating system or the Microsoft PocketPC operating system.
Palm Pilots present an interesting challenge to IT staff who are trying to support it. At one firm I worked at, we went through several different policies in regards to supporting PDAs. Originally, we would not support any PDA, though if a member of management were to purchase one, we would support them individually. Eventually, we decided on a standard and if anyone were to buy the standard PDA we would support it. This allowed us to designate an expert (which coincidentally happened to be me) on PDAs and be able to develop support procedures for the specific PDA we would support.