Consoles are computers that have less powerful hardware but are only programmed to handle a few tasks, such as video games or DVDs and so on.

look at task manager on your computer, a normal computer is running anywhere from 20 to 70 programs in the back round and they are all written in different formats. Second you cycle through pages in a mater of seconds on computers.

Consoles have about half the power of a computer, but they are only running one program at a time. The game or DVD you are playing is very limited to only a few playable formats. Last, your console renders small parts of the game at a time (levels or areas) so that it can play that part pre loaded without much lag.

The software they can read

PCs have a static memory drive, meaning that it holds data even after the power goes off. Newer consoles like the Xbox 360 have these now, but they are only used to save game data.

PCs have to run huge amounts of other processes in the background when your playing a game on them, plus, they are often used for more than just playing games and need to have the data for every tiny little thing organized in a way so that it can access it as fast as possible.

Consoles read the data directly from a disk, keeping a minimum amount of data stored in memory (meaning you don’t have to install a game on a console like you do with a PC)

So I guess the main difference is that whilst PCs are made for multiple tasks, Consoles are made purely to play games on.

Want the knitty-gritty details of the inner workings, search for it at (www.wikipedia.org)

Not a very good explanation, but hoped it helped xD

Lol, Xbox is not a consule! It is made by Microsoft. Xbox anything is like a computer specifically made for gaming. Nintendo and PlayStation are consules.
It dosnt have all the defrags and cookies and stuff because ( For the cookies ) It is not surfing the web, visiting all the websites and what not that a person does on a computer. and for the defrags, it dosnt need that because the machine is quite simple compared to a full computer.
You should know a bit about what cookes and the defrag does, then you would know the answer.
Cookies keep bits of info from websites
Defragging… Thats more complicated to explain. You see all the programs that computer does needs to go places and things get scattered, defrag puts peices back to gether and reorganizes things.

Video game consoles are computers in a sense. The difference is that a game console is designed specifically for entertainment rather than web-surfing, writing documents, etc. So game consoles are designed for one purpose with some side purposes like music and videos. Computers have to have a lot more maintenance because they do a lot more and have a lot more complications.

becouse it dosent have a rael hard drive and u can frag it but xbox360 and other game systems that u can play on line cant get cookies

With the pc, online is usually free, the games take longer to come out, bugs and glitches are usually more frequent, mods are easier to install on the game, and it costs a lot just to get the proper equipment to even play the game. But with the consoles you get all the equipment you need right there. You might need to pay a bit for online and accessories, but still a lot less of a pain.

A computer has can have better or worse specs than a console. That’s why no console could handle Crysis, but some computers can’t handle what a console can do.

computer games sometimes come out later than the console versions which gives the developers a chance to improve on the game, for example gears of war for pc has extra stuff than the 360 version. also the pc versions might have some bugs, like the gears of war pc version has been reported to make ppls computers crash. other than that i dont think theres that much difference