With enhancements and the increase of new technology, more products become available that we consider for our environment. There are various hardware and software used in organizations today that perform computational tasks which improve overall performance. Every computational system consists of important hardware and software. As the IT-Coordinator of Sonora Behavioral Health, I use many devices in my daily routine. Working in the IT department requires me to use routers, switches, fax/copier, scanner, digital camera, flash drive, printers, computers, data projectors and software to interact within the organization. This paper will explain in detail how and what hardware and software are used in Sonora Behavioral Health. Hardware components are represented by electrical or electromechanical components from which computer systems or any computational systems are constructed. All computational systems contain the following type of hardware components; input/output devices, processing and controlling and memory and storage devices. Input devices include mice, keyboard, cameras and microphones. Output devices may include a monitor, speakers, and printers and so on. Some devices are classified as input and output devices, such as a sound card or certain types of video cards. A sound card can process audio and output to a speaker, it can also be used to record audio through an audio input port. There are some types of video cards that have the ability to receive audio/video input from devices such as a TV or video camera. The Central Processing Unit (CPU) of a computer system or computational device is the main hardware component which performs the actual calculations. It could be thought of as the “brain” of the computer. Processing, input and output cannot be achieved without the use of memory. This is often referred to as RAM (random access memory) which is temporary storage of instructions and data. Everything the CPU needs to process must be stored in RAM first. RAM is volatile memory which is only available while the computer is turned on and has power, when power is lost the information stored in RAM is lost. A storage device is similar to computer memory but it is stored permanently unless removed or deleted. Storage devices include hard drives, CD’s, DVD’s, flash drives and so on. Software components of any computer system or computational environment are defined as the programs that control the whole computer and computational system. Software includes the operating system, system utilities, computer languages and software applications. Software falls into two broad categories; system software and application software. Systems software often called an operating system, controls the basic input and output functions, allocates system resources and manages storage space. Systems software is able to communicate directly with the computer hardware devices and has complete control over the hardware. Operating systems software lies between the hardware devices and applications software. Application software allows you to use your computer for a specific purpose. There are many types of application software including word processing, email programs, games, internet browsers, graphical processing programs, virus scanning software, etc. At Sonora Behavioral Health our facility is part of a network of over twenty hospitals around the country. All facilities need to be in constant communication and are linked together using various networking hardware. All computers are able to communicate using a Network Interface Card (NIC). Every computer in the facility has a NIC and use a Category 5e cable to communicate. A Cat5 cable is a twisted pair cable consisting of 4 pairs of wires. Using wires in balanced pairs helps preserve a high signal-to-noise ratio. A router is a physical device that joins multiple wired or wireless networks together. Wireless routers are typical in homes with multiple computers. This is common and allows the internet connection to be shared between multiple computers. A router uses a piece of storage called a routing table which gives the router the ability to filter and control traffic, either incoming or outgoing. At Sonora a Cisco 1800 router is used along with a wired T1 high speed connection to the main Data Center in Nashville, Tennessee. If the T1 line is disconnected for any reason, then we are cut off externally but all the computers and network devices in the building can still communicate with each other through the use of a switch. A switch is a hardware device that joins multiple computers together within one local area network (LAN). At our facility our router is connected to a series of Cisco 24 port switches. Every computer in the building is connected with a Cat 5e wired cable to the switches in the server room. In case the router goes down, I installed a Cisco VPN Firewall to share an internet connection to our facility. A computer needing access to the internet would need to be manually configured. We have a dual server set up to manage local file sharing. These are extremely old Pentium II PowerEdge Servers and are considered dinosaurs. To better understanding of our hardware setup I created a diagram of our server room. The following is a diagram of our server room.

We also have 15 printers in the facility. Ten of these printers have a NIC card and are networked so all computers will have several printer choices in case one fails. Some offices have local printers configured deliberately for example; our business development office needs a high quality printer (HP Laser Color Jet 3800) for brochures and pamphlets. If this printer was on the network, other users could print and utilize it. We have four Ricoh MP 6000’s which are multi-purpose print stations which has the ability to scan, fax, copy, and email print jobs. When a patient is admitted to the hospital, the administration department uses a Coolpix Digital Camera to take the patients picture and use one of our color laser printers to print the picture and post it on the patient chart. There is a great amount of paperwork involved with admitting patients. We use a Fujitsu 6130i document fed scanner to scan this paperwork to the patients file. This scanner has the ability to scan up to 40 pages per minute at 600 dpi in color. Several times a week there is conferences and meetings that need a data projector to display the presentations. I use a flash drive to transfer the required presentation to our Dell Latitude D620 laptop. The laptop is then connected to our data projector for the presentation. On the software side all computers have Windows XP Professional SP3 except for our two servers which have Windows 2000 Server SP4. We use many applications to perform daily tasks including; Healthcare Management Systems (HMS) which is a healthcare program that manages all patient data, accounting/finance, billing/collecting and insurance systems; Microsoft Office 2003 suite; 3M coding software; Symantec Corporate Antivirus; HMS Transcription software; Kofax Virtual scan for our scanner which has Optical Character Recognition (OCR) which recognizes and recreated a document from paper to a formatted document file on the computer; Citrix Presentation Desktop; Manage Engine OPutils is a network management software; Adobe Acrobat Professional 9.