basic computer part - 3

The Windows 7 Start Button 

Arguably, the most important part of the Taskbar is the Start button. The Start button is where a lot of the action takes place in Windows 7. The Start button can be found in the bottom left of your screen, and looks like this:

Click the Start button once with your left mouse button and you'll see a menu appear:

The Start menu is split into two different areas. The white area on the left is for software programmes that you have installed on your computer. But these are the programmes you have recently used. If an entry has a black arrow it means that documents can be opened by clicking the shortcut. For example, here's what happens when we click our Microsoft Word entry above:

We have four recently opened documents that we can click on. These will then open in Word.

Notice the small pin icon to the right of the Recent list. Clicking the icon will pin that document to the Word shortcut menu. This is useful if you open one particular document all the time.

You can see more software by clicking on "All Programs" at the bottom of the Start menu. The area on the left will be replaced by a list of programmes available to you:

Software can be launched by clicking on an icon with the left mouse button. However, the yellow folders will expand when you click on them, revealing more options available to you. For example, clicking on the yellow Games folder will reveal the following:

To start the programme, click once with your left mouse button on your chosen item. To return to the first list of programmes, click < Back at the bottom of the menu.

The other area is the darker strip on the right. These are shortcuts for locations on your computer. We'll explore these options in later sections, especially the Control Panel and Computer options. But one more thing to notice in the dark area on the right of the Start menu is the Shut down button. Clicking this will obviously shut down your computer, but click the arrow to the right of the Shutdown button to see the following options:

As you can see, there are five options on the menu. The first is useful if you share your computer with others, and have set up multiple accounts. Click Switch user to see other account names. A user can then enter login details without the need to shutdown the computer and start again. The Log Off option logs you out of your account. Again, the computer doesn't shut down. Instead, you'll see a screen where you or others can log back in again. The Lock option prevents others from using the computer until you enter your password again. (You'll learn how to set up multiple users accounts in a later section.)

The final two options are Restart and Sleep. The Restart is self-explanatory. But the Sleep option is useful if you're not going to be using the computer for a while. It powers down the hardware, saving you energy.

 

Start Menu Picture

If you look at the top of your Start menu you'll see a picture, which is a flower in the images above. You can change this. Click the picture with your left mouse button and a new screen will open. This one:

Click the link for Change you picture. You'll then see others images you can use:

Select a picture from the ones available, or click the Browse for more pictures link. When you're happy with your selection, click the Change Picture button at the bottom.

Searching from the Start menu

At the bottom of the left-hand area of the Start menu is a Search area:

If you have forgotten where you stored or downloaded a particular file, simply type its name (or just part of its name) in the search box. You should then see search options appear:

In the image above, we're searching for anything related to the search term "york". Window 7 has found 15 documents, 3 pictures, and 215 files. In the files section, you can see little envelope icons, meaning Windows has searched all our emails as well.

If the file you're looking for is not there, then click where it says "See more results".

In the next part, you'll learn how to set up a new user account, so that others can share the computer.

User Accounts in Windows 7 

If you have more than one person using the computer it makes sense to create a user account for them. That way, they can have their own backgrounds, themes, internet settings, etc.
To create a new account, click your picture on the Start menu:

This will open up the following screen:

Click on the link that says "Manage another account" and you'll see this screen:

There are already two accounts set up here. One is a Guest account, and the other is an Administrator account. If an account is set up as Administrator then you have full control of what happens on the computer. The other type of account is called a Standard account. This is the type of account you should set up for other people, as it means they don't have full control on the computer. For example, if they wanted to install software, they would have to type in an Administrator's password to do so. Which means they'd have to ask you. This makes your computer more secure than it otherwise would be. (Only Administrators can set up accounts for others.)

So to create a new account, click on the link "Create a new account", which is circled in red above. You'll then see a new screen:

Type a name for the account in the text box. (We'd just called ours User2.) Keep it on the default option, Standard user. Then click the Create Account button at the bottom. You'll then be taken back to the account page:

As you can see the new account is created, along with a random picture (a balloon, in this case). The Owner account will still be selected, however. Click on your new account and you'll be able to change some settings for it:

"Change the account type" means setting it to either a Standard user or an Administrator. But you can create a password for this account by clicking the link. You'll then be taken to the password screen:

 You can ignore all the dire warnings if this is a new account, as they won't have any encrypted files, certificates or website password. But type a password, and a password hint. Then click the button at the bottom "Create Password". You'll then be taken back to the account options.

 Parental Controls in Windows 7

Hard Drive Basics 

The Hard Drive on your computer is where all your files are stored. Not only that, it's the place where the Operating System itself is installed. A hard drive is a physical thing inside of your computer. If you were to take it apart, you'd see one of more disks (called platters), one on top of the other. In a modern hard drive, however, there's usually just one platter. The disks are magnetised and can be written to and read from. The writing and reading is done by an arm which moves across as the disk is spun round. If you were buying a new hard drive, you'd see a figure like 7,200 rpm (revolutions per minute) or 10, 000 rpm. This refers to the speed at which the disks spin. The higher the spin speed the faster the hard disk will be.

Not all hard drives use the spinning disk and arm approach, however. A modern laptop or Netbook may use something called a Solid State Drive (SSD). These have no moving parts, and are considered faster than a hard drive. However, the space available on a SSD is a lot less than on a hard disk, but this could change over the next few years or so. At the moment, SSDs are lot more expensive than hard drives. But again, this could change.

Whichever drive you have, hard or Solid State, just bear in mind that a drive is a physical thing that you use to store files, install programmes and Operating Systems.
The size of a hard drive does not refer to its height or width but to how many Gigabytes of data can be stored on it. If you're wondering how big a Gigabyte is then think of a single byte as holding, say, one letter of the alphabet. A kilobyte can then hold a thousand letters (actually, 1024 letters as there's just over a thousand bytes in a kilobyte). A Megabyte could hold 1, 000, 000 letters (1, 048, 576 bytes), and a Gigabyte 1000, 000, 000 letters (1 073, 741, 824)!

But those numbers are fairly meaningless in modern-day computing. Think of how big a picture is that you take on a camera phone. A medium sized image will be about 250 kilobytes. So you could get four if the memory held only a megabyte and about 4 000 if you had a Gigabyte of memory on your phone.

You can check to see how big the hard drive is on your own computer. To do that, start up Windows Explorer by clicking its icon just to the right of the Start button:

When Windows Explorer starts, you'll see this screen:

The default location is inside of the Libraries folder. Click the Computer section instead:

You'll then see this:

This area should display a graphic of how much space you have left on your hard drive, and how big it is. In the image above, this computer has a hard drive size of 465 Gigabytes (GB), and there is still a roomy 410 Gigabytes of space free to use. The image also shows other drives attached to the computer, a DVD writer in this case. If you have a USB memory stick, it should show up here when it is inserted.

Note also that the drive has the name Local Drive (C:), or just the C Drive for short. This C Drive is also known as the root drive, as everything is stored on it. Think of it as the master folder that holds all other folders and files inside of it.

Now click on the C drive to highlight it. You should see some extra option become available at the top:

The one we're interested in is the Properties option. Click on this and you'll see a dialogue box appear. This one:

Again, we see a graphic of how big the hard drive is, and how much space is free. The graphic this time is a pie chart.

One thing to note here is that the size of the hard drive is 465 Gigabytes, even though it was marketed as having a 500 gigabyte hard drive. So why the discrepancy? It's because the manufactures uses a small "g" for gigabytes, and they use 1 gigabyte to mean a billion bytes. However, a true Gigabytes has a capital "G" and means 1 073, 741, 824 bytes. So a 500 Gigabyte hard drive actually has 35 GB missing!

Hard Disk Cleanup

If your hard drive is showing a lot of used space, and not much free space, then click the button "Disk Cleanup" to see if you can rescue some space. You should then see a small dialogue box like this one:

When Windows has finished its calculation, you'll then see this:

Disk Cleanup is telling us that it has found 90.0 Megabytes of files that it can safely delete. These are the ones with check marks. You can check any of the other boxes, as well. For example, the image above shows that the Recycle Bin has 1.97 GB of files in it. If you're sure you haven't accidentally sent an important file to the Recycle Bin then you can safely delete these files as well. In which case, give it a check mark by clicking inside of its box. The same applies to all the others on the list (scroll down to see more). Click on an item to see a description of just what each item on the list does.

You can also click the button at the bottom "Clean up system files". All this does is to add even more areas to the list. But you need to delete the system files with care. If you're not sure about an area, leave it unchecked.

When you're happy with your selections, click the OK button to free up disk space. Windows will then go to work erasing the files and documents you have selected. When it's done, it will return to the Disk Cleanup screen:

In the image above, we're freed up 2 Gigabytes of space.

Another area worth exploring in the image above is Tools. Click this tab at the top to see the following screen:

You only need to click the Error-checking option if you've been having a few problems with your computer. Otherwise, you can leave it alone. The Defragmentation option is really a matter of choice. If you have a big hard drive with lots of space, there's little point in defragmenting. It's supposed to speed up file access times, but is really only relevant on older hard drives that don't have much free space. The Backup option is worth exploring. When you click the button, Windows will search your computer for other drives, like DVD writers. If it finds one, it will ask you to use that to backup your files. More expensive versions of Windows 7 will have better options for back up, like a network drive. You should always back up your important files and documents, but cheaper versions of Windows 7 are not that much help - you could easily copy your files to a DVD yourself, without Window's help!