Real Basics for Beginners in Windows XP

There will always be people who are learning computer for the first time. The young ones learn by jumping right into it, learning the basics on the play. (My three and a half year old son did just that without much coaching from me. He just watched me while I was on the computer and he just imitates my action). And for the not so young ones who may be intimidated by this Windows thing, hopefully the following basics will help get you on the way.

Let's begin with the frequently used terms or jargons that computer users use everyday relating to computing. Mastering these will not get you a degree or anything but at least you won't be staring at the other party with a blank face that says "What on earth are you talking about?"

• Operating System
  It is the piece of software that every computer runs when you switch it on. Contrary to what some may believe, a computer is merely a dumb piece of hardware, until you start putting into it the various software. The very first software is the Operating System. (OS) Put simply, you communicate with the computer hardware through the operating system. The moment you switch on your computer, the first thing it does is to start up the OS. Microsoft Windows XP is an operating system. Among the common ones for personal computers are Apple Mac OS/10, the Linux OS, Unix.


• The Desktop
  The Windows desktop is simply what you see on the screen after you have started the computer. It is your computer workarea. Similarly to your normal desk top where you work, it has all kinds of stuff and junk on it, depending on how organized or messy you are. My desktop (both computer and real desktop) is always an organized mess, as I would like to put it.


• Task Bar
  The task-bar is the area across the bottom of your screen. If you have any open files/programs (or 'tasks') running, they will be display on the task-bar. Switching between programs / tasks is just a matter of clicking that program / task with your mouse.
  




• System Tray
  The System Tray is the section of icons on the right hand corner of the task bar. Generally these are the programs that run silently in the background, and could be invoke any time you wish by just clicking them.


• Icons
  No, they are not the religious icons or a star idol. They are just little graphic images that are used to represent the different task or programs. To start a program is merely a matter of double clicking the icon.


• My Computer
  This icon appears on the desktop. Clicking this icon will open a window which shows the different storage devices like harddisks, CD-Drive, DVD drive, and some common folders like My Documents folder. So when you want to look at the data on any of your storage devices, the quickest way to do it is by clicking the My Computer icon.


• My Documents
  Files and documents are stored on the hard drive and organized in any number of ways that you wish. Sometimes it is helpful to have a folder that you could access quickly by just clicking the icon. This is what My Documents is for. You can use this as a temporary storage folder to put your files and documents so that it could be move to other folders for organization. For example, you may be downloading a file on the Internet and will need to specify where to save the file. The best place would be the My Document folder, where you can go to to retrieve later. The My Documents icon, like the My Computer icon is created as part of the Windows XP default setup.


• Double-Click
  A term we hear all the time. It simply refers to the action of clicking your mouse button twice quickly in succession. That will start up the program you wanted. Clicking your mouse button once simply highlight that icon you click on. Double click will activate / start the program.


• Short-Cut
  It probably gets its name from the physical world where we take short cuts (the shorter alternative way) to somewhere. So the Windows short-cut is an icon that basically points to a file or a program. It is a link to a program or file that may be buried somewhere many levels down, on your harddisk. It offers the means to get to that file or program quickly by just double-clicking it to activate it. So an icon can represent an actual file/document/program or it may be a shortcut to that file. You can tell a shortcut from the actual file by the small arrow in the lower left of the shortcut icon. Deleting a shortcut icon does not delete the actual file whereas deleting a file or program icon will remove that to the trash bin


• Left click or Right Click
  The left click or the right click simply refers to the left and right button on your mouse. On Windows XP, clicking the left button will highlight the program/file icon, while double clicking the left button starts the program or opens that document. The right button click have a different function. It presents a menu of actions specific for that program or document. Double clicking the right mouse button will not serve any special function, as double clicking the left mouse button.


• Minimize, Maximize or Closing a window
  You will notice that on the top right hand corner of every window that you open up, there are three buttons that look like this:
  The dash button is for minimizing an open window, while the middle button will maximize/enarge the window to cover the entire screen. And the X button closes the window. Minimize also closes the window but only temporarily. When you minimize a window, it will be closed and will now appear as a task on the task-bar. When you click the task, the window will be restore to its previous size. Closing a window with the X button will close the window and terminate whatever program is running in that window.


• Changing the size of the window
  You may manually resize a window by click the border or corner of the window and hold the mouse button down while at the same time dragging the mouse towards the window to make it smaller or away from the window to enlarge it. This way you can resize the window to whatever size you like. The difference between this and the maximize action is that maximize will open the window to its largest size that takes up the whole screen.
  Note: When the window is in a maximize state, you cannot manually resize it. This action will be disabled. In order to do this, you will need to exit the maximized state by clicking the same middle button again.


• Moving your windows
  To move your windows around the screen, you click and holding down the mouse button on the top title-bar of the window and drag it in any direction you desire. As with resizing, you cannot move the window when you are in maximized state.


• Hard Drive/Hard Disk
  All your programs and data needs to be stored somewhere. And this will be stored on the hard drive (sometimes refered to as the harddisk). Even your Operating System software is stored on the harddrive. Data will be available until you erased them from the hard drive. However sometimes a hard drive can fail due to hardware failure of the components of the hard drive. In such as event, you will lose all your data stored on the hard drive. Hence it is important to backup your data somewhere else.


• Backup
  This refers to the process of copying the information/data that you have on your hard drive, to another storage medium such as a tape drive or a CD/DVD disk. Because backup takes time and extra efforts, most people will neglect this task. One generally do not appreciate the importance of doing backups until disaster strikes. By which time it will probably be too late.


• Directories and folders
  Your electronic data are stored on your hard drive in directories or folders. They refer to the same thing. Just think of them as the folders you use in the office to put documents in, to categorize them. Likewise for electronic data you follow pretty much the same concept. Not only do you put files and documents in them, you may also have folders as well.


• Recycle bin
  Also known as the trash bin. Whenever you delete a file or document, it will automatically be moved to the Recycle bin. Even though you may have deleted the file, it can still be retrieved if it has not been removed from the Recycle bin. You just open the Recycle bin, and inside are all the files you have deleted. To restore the file , you right-click that file with your mouse and select Restore. And you will find that file back where you deleted it from. Like a physical trash bin, they gets filled up after a while. You can empty the Recycle bin by right-clicking the Recycle bin icon and select Empty Recycle bin. And all the files will be removed permanently and you will not be able to retrieve them again (except with help from knowledgeable people). If you want to selectively remove files from the Recycle bin, just click on each file and press the Del key.


• Blue Screen Death
  This term refers to situation well known in the Microsoft Windows environment, whereby the computer crashed due to any of the many possible reasons, and the whole screen display background appears as blue, with the error message displayed. This is known as death simply because there is no way to recover from this error apart from restarting your computer.


• Ctrl-Alt-Del
  If you have not heard of this term before, you will soon hear alot about it. What it means is pressing the three keys on your keyboard together - the Ctrl, Alt and the Del keys. It may seem quite a feat to pressing all three together. To do it, you hold down the Ctrl key first, and then the Alt key with two fingers on your left hand, and then press the Del key with your right hand.
  What does pressing these do? If you are using Windows XP Home Edition, it will bring up the WIndow Task Manager. With this Task Manager, you can performance various system tasks. As a beginner, I would recommend that you leave these alone except in a couple of situations. If a program is no longer responding to your mouse, you may bring up this Task Manager to end the task by clicking End Task. This will force that misbehaving program to terminate. If WIndows XP has not hung totally, then that program will close and you will be brought back to the Windows desktop.
  If you are using Windows XP Professional edition, Ctrl-Alt-Del will bring up the Windows Security window. With this you may lock the computer (no-one can use the computer unless first keying in the correct password), logoff (close all program and exit to the login screen), Shutdown (tell Windows XP to shut down the computer), Change Password, or start the Task Manager.(which will be the same as the Windows XP Home Edition Task Manager).


• DOS Prompt Commands
  Windows XP uses a rich graphics interface for the users to operate the computer. When you click the delete key on a file or document, it deletes that file. A simple operation. You can also type the command manually in a DOS window, for example del fileA will delete fileA. Why bother to use the DOS commands when it is so much easier to use the graphics interface? In most cases, you would do just that. But there are times when you may need to do it at the DOS prompt. Which sometimes could be faster. For example, to find out the network information of my computer, I just need to type ipconfig at the DOS prompt. Using the graphics interface, I may need to click a number of clicks in order to arrive at the same result. Especially when you need to follow up with other commands to get more results. As a beginner, you probably won't use this much. Just for your information only, so that you know what people are talking about when they mention the DOS prompt. To bring up the DOS prompt window, you click the Start button, and select Run.. And you type into the command box cmd. This will open up a window with the DOS prompt C:>