Components

Hard drive –

A hard drive is a device for storing and retrieving digital information. Today's computers typically come with a hard disk that contains several billion bytes (gigabytes) of storage.

Standard hard drive is a size of a humans hand and it can even hold over 1000GB (1TB) of data. If not for the hard disk drive all of our information on a PC would not exist strictly because there would be no device that would actually store the information, as computer on its own doesn't act as a storage device, for this purposes you have an external component. However, the main limitation of hard drive is that it is the slowest part. Due to the limited capacity it may slow down your PC if it fills up. This can affect how quickly images are loaded on a computer as well as applictions e.g. Adobe Photoshop.

Graphics card -

A peripheral device that attaches to the PCI or AGP slot in your computer to process and deliver video. Once installed in the computer, a cable is used to attach the graphics card to a computer monitor. High performance graphics cards allow to view pictures and images in high resolution which makes the image sharper and presents greater details. This especially aids graphics designers in their work.

Processor -

A processor is the computers brain. The processor tells your computer what to do and when to do it for example if you click on the internet explore icon a message will be sent to the computer processor and it will make it open and make it connect the things it has to.

RAM -

The RAM is the memory in the computer and it stands for Random Access Memory. If you add more RAM to your computer, you reduce the number of times your CPU must read data from your hard disk. This usually allows your computer to work faster, as RAM is many times faster than a hard disk.

How can these affect the performance of the computer?

The more RAM computer has the faster it is going to be because by adding more RAM you reduce the number of times your CPU (Central Processing Unit) must read data from your hard disk and therefore this usually allows your computer to work considerably faster.