A bit is the smallest unit of information a computer can use. It is therefore the smallest unit of measurement as well, represented by the small letter b. Group eight bits together and you have one byte , for which the abbreviation is the capital letter B. A byte is used to represent a character such as a letter, number or symbol, so it is much more useful to your computer.

When you use large numbers of bits or bytes, the measurement units are changed to reflect the size. One kilobit, for example, represents approximately a thousand bits (actually 1024, but it is rounded off), and "kilo" is abbreviated by the capital letter K. Since computer data transmission is usually measured in bits per second, you may see a telephone modem's speed represented as 28,800 bits per second, or 28.8 Kb per second (Kbps ).

Web browsers, on the other hand, normally display download speeds as kilobytes (KB) per second, shown as KB/s (if you use Internet Explorer) or K/s (if you use Netscape). Consequently, when your browser shows you downloading a file at "only" 100 KB/s, that is actually equivalent to a transmission speed of about 800 Kbps! You thought your old 56K modem was fast when it connected at 46000 bps (a whopping 46 Kbps!).

Think of data travelling at bits per second as cars driving down a single-lane highway. Now think of those same cars driving down an eight-lane expressway and you have data moving at bytes per second. A dial-up connection is that single-lane highway with a speed limit of 56 MPH, but your cable Internet connection is a multi-lane Autobahn with a 10,000 MPH speed limit. Where would you rather drive your Pentium?

The table below can be used to convert between bytes, kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes.

You can also visit http ://onlineconversion.com/computer.htm for a conversion tool that you can use as needed.

Terabytes (TB)	GigaBytes (GB)	Megabytes (MB)	Kilobytes (KB)	Bytes (B)
			1	1,024
		1	1,024	1,048,576
	1	1,024	1,048,576	1,073,741,824
1	1,024	1,048,576	1,073,741,824	1,099,511,627,776