Summary | With Windows Explorer, explore and discover
your hard drive, especially the Program Files folder, the default My files
folders, and the all-powerful Windows folder. Use the Control Panel, the Start
Menu, and other shortcuts.
What is it?
Your attitude.
At the one extreme, computers are complex and expensive, and we
use them as little as possible. We treat them reverentially because of their
awesome power, especially their destructive power. We aren't nearly as smart as
they are and we can only make mistakes. We will probably break something.
Computers get infected with viruses. They crash and we lose all our work. Our
boss considers them valuable company property and has hired specialists to take
care of them. Computers are for serious work only and we'll get in trouble if
use them without explicit permission. We shouldn't do anything personal or
private with them. For sure, we shouldn't have fun.
At the other extreme, there's my son, David. In 1980, when he
was 12, we finally gave in and bought him a little personal computer, a Timex
Sinclair ZX80.
Within an hour, he had taken it apart, disassembled it with a screwdriver. He
had bits of metal and silicon and cracked plastic and no idea of how to put it
back together. Until recently, he was the webmaster at SUNY Plattsburgh.
At the one extreme, you can't do much about your boss or your
company's policy. They own the computer. If they're full of FUD -- fear,
uncertainty, and dread -- then you have to buy into that attitude, at least at
work. It's Dilbert time!
At the other extreme, if you're a curious tinkerer like David,
just keep clicking. Help others. Let me know when you want to share your
discoveries or when you need some help or advice.
Where will your attitude range between those extremes?
I want to encourage you to explore and discover. You'll
learn a lot by asking questions and helping other. It's your computer, not mine
or the school's. Make lots of mistakes. Make lots of messes. And above all, have
some fun.
skills
Explore
your hard drive.
Begin
to form an accurate mental model of what's on your hard drive.
tree metaphor
tools vs jobs
tools
Windows Explorer, Control Panel, Windows
shortcuts
Tip | There are almost always two and often three or
more ways to do the same thing in Windows.
How to get around
I recommend using Windows Explorer
instead of My Computer.
The main difference: My Computer opens folders in separate
windows and Windows Explorer keeps them all together.
To open it, right-click on the Start button and select Explore.
On the right is a screen shot of mine.
While the rest of this page tells you how to use Windows
Explorer to view your C: drive, you may want to learn more about using it to manage your files.
customizing
The screen shot to the left shows how I
customize the view I have of my C: drive through Windows Explorer. So that you
can follow along, you may want to customize yours for the same view.
On the View pull-down menu, I have chosen Details because it
gives me the most information.
If you don't see the left-hand Folders pane, select Explorer Bar
| Folders.
If you're seeing something that looks like the screen shot
below, you're viewing it as a Web Page; uncheck that option in the View menu.
You can do some other things to customize Windows Explorer:
Resize
the whole window by grabbing the faint diagonal lines at the very bottom right
corner.
Re-position
Windows Explorer by holding down the left mouse button over the teal bar at the
top. Your color scheme is probably different, but you can drag the window
anywhere on your screen.
Re-proportion
the two panes by hovering your pointer exactly atop the little gray strip
between the two panes. The pointer will change to something like <--> and
you can then slide to the left or right.
Re-order
the columns by placing the pointer on Name, Size, Type, and Modified headers in
gray and holding down the left mouse button while you drag the header to another
poistion. Note also that hovering the pointer on the seam between headers will
give you the <-->, which you can slide.
renaming
You will note that I have renamed My Computer to george and
Recycle Bin to trash. Most items on your desktop and elsewhere, you can rename.
How?
Option 1: Click once on the word you want to rename, which will
highlight it. After a short pause, click once on it again. Type the new
name.
Option 2: Right-click on the word you want to rename. Select
Rename. Type the new name.
shortcuts
To put Windows Explorer on your desktop:
Step 1: Open Explorer (as above) or open My Computer.
Step 2: Navigate to C:\WINDOWS and slide down to Explorer.exe.
Step 3: Right-click on Explorer.exe and select Create Shortcut.
Step 4: Find the shortcut, probably at the bottom of the window. Drag it onto
your desktop. Rename it if you'd like to.
Step 5: If you don't want it cluttering up your desktop, drag the shortcut onto
your Quick Launch task bar. Then delete
the shortcut from your desktop by dragging it to your Recycle Bin.
Note the little white square with the black arrow
pointing northeast. This is not the program itself. It is an icon linked to the
program's .exe file. You can safely move, delete, or rename this shortcut
without in any way affecting the program itself.
If you right-click on it and select Properties, you can create a
hotkey comination for it or change its icon.
One of the large controversies in the hi-tech world is what
shortcuts come pre-installed on your desktop. Companies like AOL pay hundreds of
millions of dollars to get theirs on yours. Microsoft gives preferential
treatment (lower prices) to OEMs like Gateway and Dell for including theirs.
Double-click on all of the shortcuts on your desktop. If you
don't want that program, you can safely delete the shortcut as well as the
program it opens.
Explorer's focus
When you open Windows Explorer, what directories or folders will
it open to?
Tip | The terms directory and folder
are used interchangeably by most people.
If there's a particular folder or file you
access frequently, change the focus on Windows Explorer to open there each time.
Right-click on your Windows Explorer shortcut and select
Properties | Shortcut. On the left, you'll see a screenshot of mine.
In the Target box, locate the line ending with
explorer.exe. (Or EXPLORER.EXE. Windows is not case-sensitive.) Add to this line
so it reads as follows (without the quotes) "explorer.exe /n , /e ,
drive:\path\folder" substituting for drive:\path\folder the location you
want opened.
On my PC at home, Windows Explorer opens to my Desktop. Be sure
in the target field to use the exact spacing and punctuation as shown.
Thus, my target field reads:
C:\WINDOWS\EXPLORER.EXE /n , /e , c:\Windows\Desktop
In the Shortcut key box, you can enter a keystroke
combination that will replace the clicking to open Windows Explorer. Personally,
I'm very big on as few keystrokes and clicks as possible.
In the Run box, note that mine opens in a Normal window,
which I can re-position and resize. The Maximize option will obscure all the
other open windows on your desktop.
Note that you can change the icon, too.
What's on your hard drive?
Note | This is a selective tour. It does not try to
be exhaustive or definitive. To the extent that you have personalized your PC, these instructions may not
apply exactly and the screen shots may not look like your screen at all.
Open Windows Explorer by right-clicking on Start and selecting
Explore.
Windows Explorer gives you access to everything on your
computer. On the screen shot to the right (in Details view), you can see that my
computer has five drives.
A: is
for floppy disks.
B: is for a second
floppy (which I don't have; it was important before hard drives and memory got
so large).
C: is the "hard
drive".
D: is for my Iomega
Zip disks.
E: is the back-up of
the C: drive created by McAfee's Safe & Sound.
Note | To make this discussion easier, I'm going to
refer to "C: drive" and "hard drive" interchangeably as
though it is the only one on your computer.
Before we look at the C: drive in more detail, we need to begin
to build a mental model of it. All the files are stored in little spaces and
assembled when you need them. When we're trying to get things done, we can't
deal with that level of complexity, so Windows presents the contents of the
drive metaphorically.
mental model I: tree metaphor
Windows uses a tree metaphor. As you click around
in Windows Explorer, you'll see that the tree expands. + is expandable. - is
fully expanded.
The fancy term is hierarchical, which means a graded or
successive series, often called levels. "Click up a level."
"Click down two levels and scroll to the file called ...."
Folders (or directories) can contain files as well as other
folders. The sub-folders are nested within each other. This nesting can
go on and on and on. If you think of the C: as the root, then any folder
or file can be found in relation to that root. This relationship is called the path.
On the left, you'll see my Program Files folder. The path to it
is C:\WINDOWS\Desktop\Program Files.
A related and very common metaphor is a family tree. You
can speak of files and folders at the same level in the hierarchy as being siblings.
Up a level is the parent folder. Down a level is a child folder.
The most important thing you can do to help yourself make the
transition from the old world of print to the new world of networked computers
is to firmly grasp this tree metaphor. My way of saying it: develop an accurate
mental model.
Every file and folder on a computer is somewhere in this tree.
It has a name unique to the folder where it is listed. While Windows (and the
hardware maker)gives you a lot to start with when you turn on your computer for
the very first time, you can make your own sections of this tree. Here's how:
Step 1: Right-click on an open area of your desktop and
select New | Folder. Rename it mba, as in the screen shots below.
Step 2: Double-click on the mba folder.
That should open the window on the left below. The path to this
folder is C:\WINDOWS\Desktop\mba. You will sometimes see it expressed as
file:///C:/WINDOWS/Desktop/mba.
Step 3: Pull down the file menu and select New | Folder. That
will create the screen shot on the right above.
Step 4: Double-click on New Folder and rename it.
As you can see from the screen shot on the left above, the path
to this folder is C:\WINDOWS\Desktop\mba\New Folder. You can rename it, let's
say to mba 504 (not shown) by right-clicking on the word you want to rename,
selecting Rename, and typing the new name.
Now let's look at it in Windows Explorer. From the screen shot
on the right above, you can see the path in the Address box and the tree in the
Folders pane.
At
the same level within the tree, the mba folder, you can create as many child
folders as you want: mba500, mba501, mba502, etc. They are siblings to each
other.
Within
each of these folders, you can save files or make new sub-folders: homework,
research, projects, etc.
To change the metaphor, think of the C: drive as your filing
cabinet. It came with some file folders and documents. It also came with a lot
of empty drawer space. You can fill the drawers with more folders, which you can
label (or name) anything you want. You can fill the folders with documents or
more folders.
After a while, only you will be able to find anything in that
filing cabinet. The same thing will happen to your computer, which is why it's
called a personal computer or PC. If I try to
use your computer after you've had it awhile, I'm going to have to continually
ask two questions: "What do you call _____?" and "Where do you
keep _____?" In other words, "What have you renamed it?" and
"What is the path to it?"
This personalized system is also referred to as your file management system.
The C: drive
In the Folders pane, highlight the C: drive and right-click.
Select Properties to see how full the drive is. Clicking every so often on Disk
Cleanup next to the pie chart is worth doing if you like a tidy hard drive.
If it's not already, open your C: drive by clicking on the plus
sign to its left. Explore every folder, paying special attention to the
following: Program Files, default My files, Windows.
(On the View pull-down menu, choose Details because it gives the
most information.)
Visualize your disk inventory folder by folder and file by file with DirGraph.
Color code the display by file dates, so you can see at a
glance how much of the space used is occupied by files that haven't been access
for an age.
Here's a strange one: SequoiaView. The screenshot shows
the C: drive on my home PC.
Ever wondered why your hard disk is full? Or what directory is taking
up most of the space? When using conventional disk browsing tools, such as
Windows Explorer, these questions may be hard to answer. With SequoiaView
however, they can be answered almost immediately. SequoiaView uses a
visualization technique called cushion treemaps to provide you with a single
picture of the entire contents of your hard drive. You can use it to locate
those large files that you haven't accessed in one year, or to quickly locate
the largest picture files on your drive.
mental model II: tools vs jobs
tools: Program Files
Using Windows Explorer, explore the folders and subfolders in
your C:\WINDOWS\Desktop\Program Files folder. (See mine above.)
With a couple of exceptions, all your applications are stored here. If you use
Netscape's browser, its cache is here also.
When you load a program, aka an application, from a CD or
download one from the Internet, this is the default folder where Windows will
save it to unless you specify otherwise.
If you want to get rid of a program, don't delete it from this
folder. Go to the Control Panel and use the Add/Remove Programs tool.
jobs: default My files
I recommend that you develop your own file
management system. Trying to be helpful, the geniuses at Microsoft have
started you off with a default system that you are welcome to adapt. If you
don't specify otherwise, files get saved into these folders.
Depending on which version of Windows you have, your folders may
look like mine in the screen shots below. Note the word "My" over and
over again.
If you ever wonder where is file went or where it is so you can
open it again, here's where to look.
Tip | Don't confuse jobs and tools.
Microsoft makes it very easy for you to do this. The jobs are
yours and the tools are theirs. If they can make you bring the job to the
tool, then you'll think you can't do your job without their tool.
It is very important that you take the tool to the job.
Then you can use whatever tool you need for the job. Keep them separate.
If you think that all your documents are "in Word",
then you're falling into the Microsoft trap. You're bringing the job to the
tool. AOL does the same thing. Less, uh, sophisticated users tend to think of
AOL as the Web. Or they are using a local ISP but they use only Netscape's
browser. They tend to think of Netscape as the Web. They don't realize that the
web page can be saved to their desktop. They don't see the web page as a
document that can be opened with other browsers or other software.
If you take the tool to the job, you can then create a file
management system or "job" management system that is independent from
the programs or "tools" you use. Don't save a document "into
Word". Save it into your file management system after you finish using Word
to edit it.
Windows
Here's where snoopy moms and righteous D.A.s learn about what
someone's been up to with their computer.
Another way of
saying that: Here's where teens and crooks lean heavily on the delete key.
Explore every nook and cranny (crook and nanny?) of the Windows
folder. As you go along:
right-click
on things to see your options
double-click on
things to open them
note the path in
Windows Explorer's Address box
(On the View pull-down menu, choose Details because it gives the
most information in the right-hand pane.) Note especially these folders:
Cookies
You'll be appalled to see how many Web sites use cookies to
remember things about you. You'll be disappointed when you open a cookie (by
clicking on it) and find out how uninteresting it is.
Cursors
If you see one that you like, choose it via the Pointers Scheme
drop-down list in the Mouse Properties dialog box that you can get to via Start
| Settings | Control Panel | Mouse.
Desktop
This folder displays graphically on your desktop.
Favorites
This list of pages came bookmarked with your browser or were
added by you as a bookmark.
Fonts
All these fonts, and only these fonts, are available on your
system. Click on them to take a look. If a Web page or other document specifies
one and it's not in this folder, the text will display an alternate or default
font.
If you download a font from the Web, for example, from Chank.com, save it to this folder to make it
available to your programs like Word and FrontPage.
History
These are shortcuts to all the web pages your browser has
requested recently. The History list has just the pages compared to the
Temporary Internet Files (see below), which are a collection of downloaded files
that you can sort. They're collected chronologically into folders corresponding
to the domain the page came from.
If you start typing a URL into your browser, the browser will
suggest ways to finish the URL by referencing this folder.
Media
If you see a .wav file, turn up your speakers and click on the
filename.
Recent
These links will re-open the most recent documents you have
opened. The same list is available via Start | Documents. To cover your
tracks, you can delete the files in this folder or you can go to Start |
Settings | Task Bar ... | Start Menu Programs and clearing the Documents menu.
Start Menu
Check out the Programs folder. These programs are also listed at
Start | Programs menu. You can delete them either place by right-clicking and
selecting Delete. Doing so won't delete the program. It will only delete this
specific shortcut to the program.
System
The innards of the operating system are here along with
configuration files, screen savers, and a lot of .dll files (dynamic linking libraries), which have the glue that
gets all the different parts of the computer hardware and software to work
together. Windows is a very delicate patchwork and incompatibility among
versions of these .dll's can really screw up your system. It's known as "dll
hell".
As long as you don't change anything by editing and re-saving,
you can't do any harm by looking. Learn more about the Windows registry.
Tip | Even if you're prompted to by Microsoft's Web
site, I wouldn't change anything in the System folder without having a complete
backup of everything and then following a careful procedure.
Temp
Windows is always making back-ups of files during use. If you're
working on a long file, you'll sometimes hear your hard drive grinding. That's
why, if you "lose" something or inadvertently delete something or an
application crashes, don't turn off your computer. You can probably retrieve it
from this Temp folder. You can also empty this folder with no discernable
difference to your computer.
Temporary Internet Files
This is your browser cache. Every .htm file, every .jpg
and .gif file, every script, every download, every media file ... they're all
stored here. By clicking the gray bars atop the listing in Details view, you can
sort by time, by size, by domain of origin, or by alpha order.
When you:
request
a Web page or other file from a web server, the file is downloaded to this
cache.
click
the Back button, the Web page will often display more quickly because it comes
from this cache.
click
the Refresh or Reload button, the browser compares the date of the file cached
here with the date of the same file on the remote server and displays the
latest.
drag
a file from here to your desktop it is available anytime, even after you clear
your cache.
The browser cache is the greatest systematic violation of
copyright in the 300-year history of copyright. Everyone does it and hardly
anyone complains. No one, as far as I know, has even filed suit for copyright
infringement over a browser cache.
To clear the cache, pull down the Tools menu in Microsoft's
browser and select Internet Options. On the General tab, click Delete Files in
the Temporary Internet files section. Note that you can change settings and
clear your History list here, too.
Learn more about caching.
Below the folders
In the narrow screen shot above right, you'll see C:\WINDOWS
highlighted in teal green in the Address box. We have been exploring the folder
list below it. (On the View pull-down menu, choose Details because it gives the
most information.) That folder list repeats in the wider right-hand pane. If you
sort by type, you should get the yellow folders first (the same list as in the
left-hand pane). Scroll down past them until you get to the .exe files.
These .exe files are all the programs that come bundled with
Windows. By checking the copyrights (right-click on one and select Properties |
Version), you can see that some are licensed. The rest are programs that
Microsoft has almost always bought from another company, often by buying the
company. By then bundling these programs with Windows, Microsoft has effectively
eliminated whole categories of software and even industries. In spite of
complaints, Microsoft didn't get into big trouble for this graveyard until they
took on Netscape in the browser wars a few years ago.
Why didn't they get into trouble sooner? Generally speaking,
folks who use Windows like having these programs bundled. I've been doing this
long enough to remember when almost every one of those programs had to be
separately researched, downloaded from the Internet via FTP (or some friend's
floppy), and finally installed. I had more choices, but I had to be pretty geeky
to do it.
For most of these .exe files, a double-click will start them.
Right-click on them and select Properties to learn more about them. For example,
Clipboard.exe will show what's on your clipboard. You can make a shortcut, drag
the shortcut to your desktop, and then be able to see the contents of your
clipboard anytime.
In addition to the .exe files, note the .bmp and .gif files.
They are the wallpaper options available via Start | Settings | Control Panel |
Display | Background.
Start Menus
On the Start menu, Programs, Favorites, Documents and Help give
you access to Windows folders as explained above. At the top are probably a
couple of other shortcuts such Open Office Document and New Office Document. To
get rid of them, right-click on your Start button and select Open, which gives
you access to the C:\WINDOWS|Start Menu folder, where you can delete or add
whatever you want.
Settings
My Taskbar Options has Always on top and Show clock
checked and Autohide and Show small icons unchecked.
The Start Menu Programs will let you customize the list
of programs as well as clear your Documents list.
Three other options on the Settings menu -- Control Panel, Folder Options, and Active Desktop -- are explained on the
page about personalizing your PC.
Find
Start | Find | Files or Folders
You can speed the process by selecting a folder to search. In
the screen shot below right, I have asked it to "Look in" only the
riccistreet folder on my desktop, which I found via the Browse button. I have
further asked it look for files which contain the phrase MBA 504.
You can increase you chance of success by searching for partial
words in both the Named and Containing text boxes. For example, if you don't
remember whether the word was factory or factories, search for
"factor".
You can search for file extensions with an asterisk as a wild
card, for example, *.htm will return all files that end in .htm or .html.
If you're totally blank on the name and location, perhaps you
can narrow the date it was Last accessed as in the top left screen shot below.
Modified and Created are the other options on the Find all files drop-down menu.
In the middle left screen shot above, you can do something
similar. The Of type drop-down menu will list every files type on your computer,
also listed on the Folder Options
menu.
After you get the results, you can choose the Details view as
shown on the lower left screen shot above. You can further sort the results by
name, folder, type, size, and date last accessed. The same options are available
in the above right screen shot. Clicking on Name will sort them in alphabetical
order. Clicking again on Name will sort them in reverse order.
Note that the In Folder column has each file's full path from
the C: drive root, also expressed as C:\. As you learn more about your
computer, you shouldn't get too many surprises in a file's path. Learn more
about organizing your C:\ drive.
Run
Windows 98 is running on top of DOS, the pre-1990 version of the
Microsoft operating system.
This has ensured for the past decade that
all the old DOS programs from the 1980's will still run on your PC. With the new
Windows XP due in late 2001, Microsoft is abandoning DOS completely. While you
still can, check it out.
Start | Run will open a DOS prompt box as in the screen shot on
the right.
See the blue and white icon that looks like an empty screen? You'll
see that same icon in the Windows directory. The screen shot on the left shows
it next to Tracert.exe. That opens Trace Route, which will let you see the path
on the Internet between two computers. If you type "tracert riccistreet.net"
(without the quotes) and click OK, you'll see a small black window that will
show you the dozen or so hops from router to router through the Internet as well
as the speed in milliseconds for three "pings", which are small test
packets.
Ten Ways To
Make Windows 98 Run Better
by Fred Langa
We all have 'em: favorite tweaks, tricks and alterations we
use to make Win98 work better or faster. Here are some of the best.
AOL users
Set your preferences
Getting Started with
Windows 98
