Tips for First-time Users of Windows

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What you see when you turn on your computer
What's a File? What's a Program?
File Extensions
Drives, Directories, and Folders
The Paths to your Files
The Parts of a Window

What you see when you turn on your computer

Many novice users are frustrated simply because they do not understand what they are looking at when they turn the machine on, and have little or no clue what to do next. What you see is your desktop. It will look something like this:

Typical Windows 9x default desktop

Typical Windows XP default desktop

The bar across the bottom of the screen is the Taskbar. At the bottom left you see a button with the Windows logo and "Start" on it (the Start button). On the extreme right there is a box, inside of which there may be one or several icons (see below). That's the System Tray.

All those little pictures with writing under them are icons. At the top left, you see "My Computer"; below it, "Explorer", etc. Icons are shortcuts. By positioning the mouse pointer over an icon and clicking twice rapidly (with the left mouse button; also called double-clicking), you start a program or open a file.

What's a file? What's a program?

A file is any collection of data stored as a single unit. Programs (also called applications) are files that do something, such as a word-processor or spreadsheet. Notepad (see the icon above, upper right on the desktop) is a program, a word-processor. Notepad is a very simple program; it consists of a single file called NOTEPAD.EXE.

File naming conventions: Names of files and folders (directories) are generally written in CAPITALS in documents like this, for reasons which lie in the distant past of DOS and Windows.

File extensions

The file extension is what comes after the dot in a file name. File extensions tell you what type of file it is. Any file with the extension .EXE, or .COM, or .BAT is a program (application).

Let's say you write a letter to Aunt Mimi with Notepad, and call it "lettertomimi"; Notepad will automatically add the extension .TXT (text) when you save it, so your letter to Aunt Mimi will end up with the name LETTERTOMIMI.TXT. The letter to Aunt Mimi is a document. Documents created with other programs might have the extension .DOC, .WRI, .WPS, .RTF, or something else. Notepad is a program; the files you create with it are documents.

There are many other file types and many other file extensions, but they do not concern us at present; most programs (applications) actually consist of many files of various types, all of which need to be present in order for that program or application to function properly.

Most of the programs and other files on your computer do not have an icon on the desktop (if they all had one, you would not be able to see anything but icons). That is why the Start button is there. Click on it once, move the mouse pointer up to Programs, and you will see something like this:

What you see is the Start menu, directly above the Start button, and the Programs menu to the right of it. Your programs (applications) will be found in the Programs menu. In this example, the Programs menu is so long it spills over into another column (with the MS-DOS Prompt at the top). The menu items with a little arrow pointing to the right, from Adobe Acrobat down to WinZip, lead to yet more menus, which will open to the right of the Programs menu if there is enough space on the screen; if not, they will open to the left.

Drives, Directories, and Folders

Your computer will have at least two drives, a floppy drive, and a hard drive; more than likely it has a CD-ROM drive as well. These drives are physical entities, and they have names, which are in fact letters followed by a colon.

Standard drive designations

Your floppy drive is the one you put those 3 1/2" disks into, and it is called A:. The hard drive is inside the computer and is called C: (you will never see it unless you take the cover off and void your warranty). The CD-ROM is called D:.

If only it were that simple. Most computers sold today have large hard drives which may be divided into two or more smaller drives. For example, you may have a 20 Gigabyte hard drive which is split into two 10 Gigabyte drives. In nerdy terms then, you have only one physical hard drive, but it is divided into two logical drives. Their designations will be C: and D:. The CD-ROM is then bumped to the letter E:. This is exactly the situation pictured below:

There is one floppy drive (A:), two hard drives (C: and D:), and a CD-ROM drive (E:). The drives C: and D: are in fact one physical drive split into two logical drives. Notice that the different types of drives have different icons: the floppy, the logical drives on the hard disk, and the CD.

You can find out what kind and how many drives you have by double-clicking the My Computer icon. You will probably see several other other icons in addition to the drives, called Printers, Control Panel, or other things; ignore them for now.

What about drive B:? Long ago the drive letters A: and B: were reserved for floppy drives. In the past, computers had no hard drive or CD-ROM, but they had two floppy drives, A: and B:. Most new computers have no floppy drive, or only one, and the default drive letter is A:. If you added a second floppy drive it would become drive B:.

Directories and Folders

Directories and Folders are the same thing. Directory is a name that predates DOS and Windows; starting with Windows 95, directories are called folders. The icon for a folder looks like a manilla folder you would put into a filing cabinet. They may appear larger or smaller, depending on how your computer is configured. The two images below illustrate large and small folder icons:

A hard drive is basically storage space, rather like a filing cabinet. Pretend the hard drive described above is a two-drawer filing cabinet. The top drawer is C: and the bottom drawer is D:. Each drawer contains various folders (directories), and within each folder there are various files. Folders can also contain sub-folders (sub-directories), like a folder inside a folder. This structure is best described as a "tree", and is shown in the picture below:

The folders visible on drive C: (This beast) in this image are best, My Documents, and Program Files. Accessories is a sub-folder of Program Files; HyperTerminal is a sub-folder of Accessories.

The Paths to your files

When you are using many programs, you will be asked to supply the path to a certain file or folder. The path is the full description of where a particular file or folder is on any drive, and includes the drive name, folder name, sub-folder name, etc., and finally the file name. Suppose you had a file called MYFILE.TXT, and it was in the HyperTerminal folder in the drive and folder structure pictured above; the full path to that file would be:

C:\PROGRAM FILES\ACCESSORIES\HYPERTERMINAL\MYFILE.TXT

In DOS and Windows, the backslash ( \ ) is used to separate the names of drives, folders, and files.

If MYFILE.TXT is on a floppy disk in drive A:, the path would be:

A:\MYFILE.TXT

Suppose MYFILE.TXT were in a sub-folder of drive A: called DOCUMENTS; then the path would be:

A:\DOCUMENTS\MYFILE.TXT

Potential confusion: Floppy disks can be removed and inserted from drive A: at will. Whatever floppy disk happens to be in drive A: is drive A:, until you remove it and put in a different one, then that floppy disk becomes drive A:. If you try to look at the contents of drive A: when there is no disk in the drive, you will get an error message, which may lead you to think your floppy drive is no longer working. If you see a message saying something like "Cannot read from drive X", check to see that there is a disk in that drive. All of this also applies to your CD-ROM or DVD drive, zip drives, memory sticks, MP3 players - any removable media.

The Parts of a Window

The window of any program can tell you more than you might think, and allow you to do things you may not be aware of.

The Title Bar: The top horizontal bar of any program's window is the Title Bar. It displays the name of the program and the name of the file you are looking at. In the example above, the name of the program is Notepad, and the name of the file you are looking at is Autoexec.bat.
The Control Box: The box or icon on the far left of the Title Bar is the Control Box (more later in Part 5).
Close, Maximize/Restore, Minimize: The three boxes at the far right of the Title Bar perform four functions, and they can only be activated with a mouse click. The box with a line along the bottom edge minimizes the window, the box with another little box within maximizes or restores the window, and the one with the X closes the program.
1. minimize the program means make it vanish from the screen without closing it - it's still running in the background, and appears as a Task button on the Taskbar. Click the Task button to make it re-appear.
2. maximize the program means make it's window fill the whole screen;
3. close the program means shut it down;
4. if the centre box has two overlapping boxes within it, then the application window is already as big as it can get - clicking it restores the window to whatever size it was before maximizing.

The Menu Bar: The next line below the Title Bar is the Menu Bar. It shows the names of the menus available; in this case, File, Edit, Search, and Help. Note that one letter of each is underlined (more on this in Part 5).