Navigating Your Computer

If you're new to computers, or you were suddenly thrust into the medium years ago, you may feel lost every time you sit down at the keyboard. But fear not, help is here! This article will help you overcome that common lost feeling by teaching you how to get around your computer, and how to do it with style! (Ok...No promises on that last one).

A Little Background

Before we start exploring your computer, it may be worthwhile to first discuss how files are typically stored on a computer. Files, are stored on drives of some kind. The most familiar drive to you is almost certainly your hard drive which is also almost always the biggest and fastest type of drive connected to your computer. As implied, there are also smaller drives that can connect to your computer that you are probably familiar with too. They are commonly called thumb drives or flash drives. (Not to be confused with CD or DVD drives). When you traverse or navigate your computer, what you are essentially doing is traversing your drives in an attractive, graphical way (since your files are represented to you by graphics of some sort). So in short, knowing how to navigate your computer enables you to navigate the contents and thereby the files of all the drives connected to it.

What is this "Desktop"?

The desktop, (other than being what we commonly call our home computer), is the place on top of your wallpaper where lots of shortcuts, files, and folders often sit. Confused? Let's try this...When you first turn on your computer and Windows loads, you see wallpaper. If you haven't changed it, it's usually a picture of clouds, or maybe it is a picture of the dell or gateway logo, or something similar. Directly on top of that wallpaper, you should see several icons, either files, folders, the Recycle Bin and maybe My Computer too. This area is referred to as your Desktop, and it turns out to be a convenient place to put files that you like to have immediate access to, as well as a great place to put Shortcuts to your favorite programs. (For the time being, we won't discuss how to use this space effectively, but it will be covered in Getting Organized).

Where to Start

The easiest place to start when navigating your computer is with the Start button. You'll see this on the bottom left hand of you screen. When you click this, a menu will be brought up that is called the Start Menu. This menu has many things in it but for now we're concerned with the text that reads "All Programs". If you move your mouse over this text, another menu pane will come up that contains a bunch of programs. Well actually, you'll find on this pane more Program Groups than programs, but then if you mouse over any of the Program Groups, you'll often then see a program or two. Now this isn't a complete listing of every program on your computer, but still a good bit of them none the less.

The Start Menu is an important place to know about because it houses shortcuts to most of the applications stored on your computer. As time goes on, you'll undoubtedly insteall more programs and this place may become a bit cluttered. But fear not! Just like any other files or folders on your computer, you can click, drag, and perform many operations on these items to make sure everything appears neat and clean!

Now if you're ready, continue on to read about hard drives, folders, and My Computer!

1, Page 2 (My Computer, Folders and Hard Drives)

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