A converts mains AC to low-voltage regulated DC power for the internal components of a computer.

Modern personal computers universally use a switched-mode power supply. Some power supplies have a manual selector for input voltage, while others automatically adapt to the supply voltage. Most modern desktop personal computer power supplies conform to the ATX form factor. ATX power supplies are turned on and off by a signal from the motherboard. They also provide a signal to the motherboard to indicate when the DC power lines are correct so that the computer is able to boot up. While an ATX power supply is connected to the mains supply it provides a 5 V stand-by (5VSB) line so that the standby functions on the computer and certain peripherals are powered. The most recent ATX PSU standard is version 2.31 of mid-2008.

Every modern PC contains an Optical Drive; the name refers to the general category of disk drives that read information optically, using a low-powered laser. CD-ROM drives were the first optical units commonly found on PCs; they began as novelties for high-end users and grew in popularity as they dropped in price and increased in performance, until the point arrived where they were mandatory equipment on any new PC system. Today we have not just CD-ROM drives but their younger and higher-capacity siblings, DVD drives. We also have writeable and rewriteable CD-ROM drives, called CD-R and CD-RW respectively. These expand the capabilities of optical drives by letting you actually write to CD-ROM media.

The Computer Memory is a temporary storage area. It holds the data and instructions that the Central Processing Unit (CPU) needs. Before a program can be run, the program is loaded from some storage medium into the memory. This allows the CPU direct access to the program. Memory is a necessity for any computer. Because the computer is an electrical device, it understands only electricity on and electricity off. This is expressed by using two symbols 0 and 1 which are called binary digits or bits. Numbers and text characters are represented as codes, which are made up of combinations of 0s and 1s. The character codes are called ASCII (the American Standard Code for Information Interchange). In ASCII, eight bits any combination of 0s and 1s form one character or symbol.

In the purest sense, the function of a Floppy Disk Drive is to provide a means of writing/reading data on/from floppy disks in an industry standardized method. Floppy Disks were invented as an improved means for storing/transporting data on/from computers. The universality and standardization of disk storage technologies was important to the personal computer industry. By standardizing these complex technologies, computer manufacturers were able to, over time, inexpensively source drives and disks, thus reducing the cost of the computer systems. This made PC's more affordable for everyone.

Parallel ATA (PATA), originally AT Attachment, is an interface standard for the connection of storage devices such as hard disks, floppy drives, and optical disc drives in computers. The standard is maintained by X3/INCITS committee. It uses the underlying AT Attachment (ATA) and AT Attachment Packet Interface (ATAPI) standards. The Parallel ATA standard is the result of a long history of incremental technical development, which began with the original AT Attachment interface, developed for use in early PC AT equipment. The ATA interface itself evolved in several stages from Western Digital's original Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) interface. As a result, many near-synonyms for ATA/ATAPI and its previous incarnations are still in common informal use. After the introduction of Serial ATA in 2003, the original ATA was renamed Parallel ATA, PATA for short.

The Expansion Card (also expansion board, adapter card or accessory card) in computing is a printed circuit board that can be inserted into an expansion slot of a computer motherboard or backplane to add functionality to a computer system via the expansion bus. One edge of the expansion card holds the contacts (the edge connector) that fit exactly into the slot. They establish the electrical contact between the electronics (mostly integrated circuits) on the card and on the motherboard.

A Power Cable is an assembly of two or more electrical conductors, usually held together with an overall sheath. The assembly is used for transmission of electrical power. Power cables may be installed as permanent wiring within buildings, buried in the ground, run overhead, or exposed.

A Computer Fan is any fan inside, or attached to, a computer case used for active cooling, and may refer to fans that draw cooler air into the case from the outside, expel warm air from inside, or move air across a heat sink to cool a particular component.

A Hard Disk Drive (HDD; also hard drive, hard disk, or disk drive) is a device for storing and retrieving digital information, primarily computer data. It consists of one or more rigid (hence "hard") rapidly rotating discs (platters) coated with magnetic material, and with magnetic heads arranged to write data to the surfaces and read it from them. Hard drives are classified as non-volatile, random access, digital, magnetic, data storage devices. Introduced by IBM in 1956, hard disk drives have decreased in cost and physical size over the years while dramatically increasing in capacity and speed.