J-M | MCSA/MCSE 2003 JumpStart

jumpers: Plastic-covered metal clips that are used to connect two pins on a motherboard. The connection creates a circuit that turns the setting to 'on.'
load balancing: Distributing similar tasks (such as accessing an application or assigning an IP address) equally across multiple computers.
local area network (LAN): A LAN is contained within a single building or campus and can operate independently of any outside connection.
local drive: Storage that is physically located on the user's own machine. Often the only local drives are the primary hard drive (C drive) and the CD-ROM (D drive).
local groups: Groups that are created on Windows NT workstations and Windows NT servers and allow for local administration of resources. Global groups or domain users could be placed into these groups to give them permissions on the NT machine.
local loop: The two-wire copper telephone cable that runs from a home or office to the central office of the telephone company.
local security: Permissions settings that take effect even if the user is working locally on the machine where the resource is located.
logging on: The process of authenticating to the network and gaining access to the network as a particular user.
logical drive: Based on how you partition your physical drive, the area of the extended partition can be organized into multiple drives. Each drive is assigned a DOS identifier from D to Z.
Logical Link Control (LLC): A Data-Link sublayer that establishes whether communication with another device is going to be connectionless or connection oriented.
loopback: A special function for testing a device's ability to communicate by making it communicate with itself.
managed hubs: Similar to hubs but with the exception that the device can be managed using software to monitor and control network communication.
Manchester encoding: A method of identifying the beginning and end of a bit signal (one or zero) when it is transmitted on the network.
master: A device that is responsible for controlling one or more directly connected devices.
Media Access Control (MAC) address: A hexadecimal number that is allocated by an international organization and is burned into the network interface card by the NIC manufacturer. Media Access Control is a sublayer of the Data-Link layer.
megabits per second (Mbps): A measurement of the amount of data, in the millions of bits per second, being transferred.
megabytes per second (MBps): A measurement of the transfer speed of a device in terms of millions of bytes per second.
megahertz (MHz): One million cycles per second. The internal clock speed of a microprocessor is expressed in MHz.
microcode: The smallest form of an instruction in a CPU.
Microsoft Management Console (MMC): A Microsoft application framework for accessing administrative tools, called consoles.
millions of instructions per second (MIPS): A measurement of the number of microcode instructions that a CPU or microprocessor can complete in one second, or cycle.
modulate: To convert digital data into analog signals. Modulation enables digital computer data to be transferred over standard telephone lines.
motherboard: The main board in a computer that manages communication between devices internally and externally.
MSDOS.SYS: A DOS system file that is loaded by IO.SYS and contains the primary DOS routines.
Multimedia Extension (MMX): A processor technology that dramatically improves the response time of games and multimedia-based applications. The technology was introduced through the MMX-equipped line of Intel Pentium chips.
multitask: To perform several operations concurrently.