Getting Started with Windows XP at Gizmos, Inc: Toolkit: PC Workshop

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?

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. He's now a systems administrator and network programmer at UB.

At the one extreme, you can't do much about your boss or your company's policy. They own the computer. They keep control by promoting a corporate culture of what the psychologists call learned helplessness. As a student recently posted at the Bistro:

As computers were introduced in the workforce, I was taught to be a user of the system. The IT Departments took every step to ensure that you didn't get out on to their ice pond. In fact, I was repeatedly shouted at and told in no uncertain terms to NOT TOUCH ANYTHING. If I did get out on their ice pond, I would fall through and drown in the freezing water.

I'm convinced I'll break something and ruin everything.

Abusive spouses use the same control tricks. If your company's written and unwritten policies promote 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.

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

tools

Tip | There are almost always two and often three or more ways to do the same thing in Windows.

learn more

Kelly's Troubleshooting WinXP - Note that Kelly's site is searchable and includes much information directly from Microsoft.

If you have a brand-new PC or laptop, you have one chance to get everything perfect. Symantec's Norton line of housekeeping products can do it for you, but you can do it yourself, too. Personally, I've never done Fred Langa's whole 20-step process.

Fred’s System Setup Secrets
by Fred Langa
Information Week (originally published in now defunct Windows Magazine), August 31, 1999; updated, January 2001

Running through a 20-step setup process is a hassle and it’s clearly not for everyone. But taking the extra time, one time, up front, to get everything perfect pays off again and again over the years when a system goes belly-up and needs to be redone. With Drive Image and a CD-R of the perfect setup in hand, I can restore a system in its entirety -- OS, apps, everything -- in just minutes.

This way gets the awful, messy, grunt-work out of the way right away, and lets you reap the rewards of a stable, easy-to-restore system for as long as you own it.

All personal computers start in stages: There's just enough special, low-level code permanently stored in the system BIOS and inside the CPU itself to get the machine going to the point where the CPU can talk to the hard drive, monitor, etc.

Once this tiny amount of initial code has run, the system then looks on your floppy or hard drive for the most basic components of an operating system. If it finds them, it loads and runs them.

These core operating system components contain the instructions the system needs to load the rest of the operating system and to complete the start-up process. In this piece-by-piece way, your computer self-starts.

How to get around

You can get access to your hard drive through two versions of the same piece of software, Windows Explorer and a focused version of it called My Computer. Windows Explorer is named in parallel to the browser Internet Explorer because Windows Explorer lets you browse your hard drive. If your computer is always online, there's really not much difference between your hard drive and the Internet. It's all accessible to you.

To manage files, I recommend using Windows Explorer instead of My Computer. The difference is that Explorer, shown below right, has the Folders option highlighted. Click on it and the Folders pane on the left will be replaced -- depending on the type of folder or file selected -- by common tasks and and details. For example, if you are in My Computer view and highlight an image file, a thumbnail will appear on the left, as shown below left. For a folder of images, don't miss "View as a slide show".

The main difference: My Computer opens folders in separate windows and Windows Explorer always has a higher-level view. It's easier to move files and folders in Windows Explorer by dragging and dropping.

To open Windows Explorer, right-click on the Start button and select Explore. Or use Winkey +e (hold down the Windows key

and press "e" on your keyboard. On the right below is a screen shot of mine.

If you don't see something that looks like this, pull down the Address bar and select Local Disk (C:). On the row above the address bar, you might need to pull down the Views icon. Or on the row above that, pull down the View menu. Select Details in either case.

The Views menu has other useful options. The Choose Details... option will let you display almost three dozens category of meta-data about a file. You generally add that information with the software tool you used to create or edit the file. You can also add much of that information by right-clicking on a file and selecting Properties and the Summary tab. Note the Advanced and Simple options.

Windows Explorer gives you access to everything on your computer. On the screen shot below right (in Details view), you can see that My Computer has three drives.

Shared Documents is the folder that holds the document accessible to other computers on my home network.

The right-hand pane shows the major divisions -- the folders -- into which my C: drive is divided. The DOCS folder has the Toshiba User's Guide in .pdf format. You can move yours elsewhere and delete the folder if it feels like clutter.

The My Downloads folder is where downloaded files will go by default if you don't specify otherwise.

The Program Files folder is where application software will go by default if you don't specify otherwise. In it, you'll find software that came installed on your computer or that you have since installed. Most installation procedures let you specify the folder in which to store application software. I recommend that you retain the Programs Files folder as your storage folder.

This is an interesting folder to visit occasionally to see what has managed to find its way there.

Tip | If you want to get rid of a program, don't delete it from the Program Files folder directly. Go to the Control Panel's Add or Remove Programs window.

The quickenw folder is where Quicken came installed instead of Program Files, and I left it there. The ScanSoft folder is where I purposely installed some software to work with a particularly troublesome piece of hardware that doesn't work well with XP. The toshiba folder has links to corporate customer service and marketing sites.

The RECYCLER folder lists everything in my Recycle Bin. The System folder is best left alone. The TEMP and WUTemp folders are default folders where applications will store temporary files made while you're working. These folders can get cluttered and periodically have their contents deleted as part of your housekeeping.

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.

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're seeing something that looks like the screen shot above right, you're viewing it in Icons view. The screen shot below that on the right is Thumbnails view.

Note the Customize This Folder option. With a little patience, your computer can look like no one else's and be very tedious for anyone except you to find their way around in.

You can do some other things to customize Windows Explorer to whatever working environment you need it in:

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 position. Note also that hovering the pointer on the seam between headers will give you the <-->, which you can slide. You can also eliminate one of the columns completely via the Choose Details... option.

renaming

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

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 taskbar. 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 combination 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 and Toshiba 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

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 (all on one line):

If you wanted yours to open to My Documents, your target field would read (all on one line):

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.

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.

If you open Windows Explorer to your C root, that is, so that the address bar reads C:\ and then click on Documents and Settings, you will see something list what's on the left in Details view (pull down the View menu and select Details).

In the right-hand pane, you'll see several folders. Windows XP lets multiple users have their own stuff, that is, their own desktop, their own file management system, etc. And each user account can have its own password.

One account, Admin, is the master account that can get into all of them. If you're the only person using your computer, it doesn't matter which one you use. However, you must be careful not to confuse them if you have access to all of them.

Be especially wary when you're saving downloaded or newly created files. If you "lose" a file, a search of your C drive will look through all of them if you so specify.

Personally, I use Admin. In the screenshot on the right, you can see folders that are common to all user accounts.

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 broken into strings of ones and zeros. The strings are broken into standard-size pieces. The pieces are stored in little spaces (cells) on the hard disk. The pieces are 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 the Program Files folder on my old version of Windows 98. 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.

That should open a window resembling the one on the left below in Details view. The path to this folder is C:\Documents and Settings\Admin\Desktop\mba. You will sometimes see it expressed as file:///C:/Documents and Settings/Admin/Desktop/mba.

Step 3: Pull down the file menu and select New | Folder. That will create the screen shot on the right above.

As you can see from the screen shot above, the path to this folder is C:\Documents and Settings\Admin\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 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?"

The C: drive

In the Folders pane of Windows Explorerr, 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 are in the Program Files folder. Jobs are in the My Documents folder. Don't confuse them.

tools: Program Files

Using Windows Explorer, explore the folders and subfolders in your C:\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 a software 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.

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. The various folders holding evidence of recent activity are especially informative.

Another way of saying that: Here's where teens and crooks lean heavily on the delete key.

Explore every crook and nanny(?), excuse me, nook and cranny 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:

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.

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.

Media

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.

User settings

The details above apply to the whole computer. Now we'll look at details that each user can set for his or her specific user account. These settings are stored in the Documents and Settings folder. Then select the user account. In the screen shot below, I selected the Admin account I use every day.

Wait a minute for them to display after you click. 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.

IE CookiesView - display the details of all cookies that Internet Explorer stores on your computer. Sort them, search by Web site, delete them, and copy them. If you don't fancy that interface, search at Google for "cookie manager"

Desktop

Favorites

This list of pages came bookmarked with your browser or were added by you as a bookmark or favorite.

Local Settings

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.

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, every cookie, every style sheet ... 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.

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, as well as change your default fonts and styles. Changing these settings will totally destroy the web page designer's work but may well make the information more accessible for you.

My Documents

This folder has the whole structure of "My" folders, however you have named and grouped them.

My Recent Documents

These links will re-open the most recent documents you have opened. The same list is available via the Start menu unless you have chosen otherwise. To cover your tracks, you can delete the files in this folder or you can right-click on Start and select Properties. On the Advanced tab, you can choose to not display and to clear My Recent Documents.

Nethood

Short for Network Neighborhood. If you have a local network set up at home or work, this folder will give you access to it and to the documents on your computer designated as "shared" with other computers on the local network. Printhood, short for Printer Neighborhood, will give you access to the printers (scanners, faxes, etc.) that may be on your local network.

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

You want to stay away from these files unless your sure of what you're doing. On most computers, the system subfolders and files are hidden on purpose and by default and only the machines Administrator account can get access.

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.

Start Menu

Right-click on your Start button and select Properties to see something like the screen shot on the left. The Taskbar is probably running along the bottom of your monitor screen. Note that you can move it to the top, left, or right, by grabbing an open area and dragging it. Selecting the Taskbar tab should get you the screen below.

Settings

My Taskbar Options screen is on the right. If yours is different it may cause some of my clicking directions to be hard to follow. You can customize the Notification area (far bottom right of the monitor screen). In addition, the screen above will let you customize the Start Menu.

The Start Menu Programs will let you customize the list of programs as well as clear your Documents list.

Find

That should produce the screen shot below right. Note that you can Change preferences to, among other things, lose the yellow doggie, and access Microsoft's extensive online help system.

You can speed the search process by selecting a file type to limit the search to. That will take you to a variation of the screen shot below left.

You can decrease the number of results by searching for partial words in both the 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.

Searching for a word or phrase in the document will slow the search but may produce a unique and accurate result.

The Look in: box can dramatically speed your search if you know the file is somewhere in My Documents, for example.

If you're totally blank on the name and location, perhaps you can narrow the date it was last modified or its size. Modified and Created are the other options on the Find all files drop-down menu.

After you get the results, you can choose the Details view. You can further sort the results by name, folder, type, size, and date last accessed. For example, 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.

You can also type "msconfig" (without the quotes) and then click Setup to see what programs open when you turn your computer on.

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





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modified: February 3, 2003 by Douglas Anderson http://RicciStreet.net/gizmos/toolkit/operatingsystem/cdrivexp.htm

Getting Started with Windows XP

The PC Workshop

What is it?

skills

tools

learn more

How to get around

customizing

renaming

shortcuts

Explorer's focus

What's on your hard drive?

mental model I: tree metaphor

The C: drive

mental model II: tools vs jobs

tools: Program Files

jobs: default My files

Windows

Cursors

Fonts

Media

Below the folders

User settings

Cookies

Desktop

Favorites

Local Settings

History

Temp

Temporary Internet Files

My Documents

My Recent Documents

Nethood

Start Menu

System

Start Menu

Settings

Find

Run

AOL users