Let us discuss
now about the basic utilities that form part of the windows Operating
system (OS). We are taking the example of Windows XP in this discussion.
My Computer: My Computer displays details of the
hardware on your PC. It displays hardware including web camera, drives you
have connected to if you are on a network. etc.. It also displays users documents
folder. Idea is to show you essential items in one single place. If you do
a mouse right click on your "My Computer" icon and click on properties, in
the general menu you can see major configuration details like memory
capacity, processor speed etc..
Windows Explorer : Windows
explorer is similar to my computer but it shows you all the files and
folders on your PC in much detail. Windows Explorer displays the
hierarchical structure of files, folders, and drives on your computer (this
a sort of tree structure explained in
organising files under "dependability" topic).
It also shows any network drives that have been mapped
to drive letters on your computer. Using Windows Explorer, you can copy,
move, rename, and search for files and folders. For example, you can open
a folder that contains a file you want to copy or move, and then drag the
file to another folder or drive.
NotePad, WordPad :
These are simple editors. At a stage when you don't have MS
Office or any other office packages loaded onto your PC, these can be your
basic editors to create a file and take a print out. Due to their basic
nature they are still useful for some text editing features etc. WordPad
is a slightly enhanced version of notepad.
Multimedia
: On installation you also get multimedia setup if your PC has a sound
card. You can check this out from the control panel "sounds and audio
devices". when you have a sound card installed on your PC you get ports
for connecting mic, speakers, line in etc.. When you connect a speaker, you
are supposed to be able to hear the sound in its best from if the volume
is up.
Browser: Browser from Microsoft is called
Internet explorer and it is used specifically to look at the Internet web
pages. Browser converts HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) to readable
format in its view. It has an address bar where you type the address of
your Internet destination ( Web site address) and wait for the information to show up on the
screen. It has features like storing favorite sites in your favorites,
looking at the history of your browsing etc..
Task Bar, Start Menu: Task bar is the bar at
the bottom of the screen where all active programs will be shown. You can
switch between active programs by clicking on the task bar. As you know
windows is a multitasking OS and how many programs you open at a time does
not affect its working. Start menu is your first, starting point from
where you can open your programs and other tools from within control
panel etc..
Printers: When you buy a printer, you install it from
within this option under settings, start menu. Basically this is a place
to store drivers (software that connects specific hardware with the OS).
Faxes are also shown within the printers area (If the fax component is
added using add remove programs in control panel). You can open the windows
XP
fax program from within here.
Computer Management. computer management is what
you get when you right button on my computer and choose "manage".
Here you
have many options; you can use computer management to:
 | Monitor system events, such as logon times and
application errors. |
| Create and manage shared resources. |
| View a list of users connected to a local or remote
computer. |
| Start and stop system services, such as Scheduled
Tasks and Indexing Service. |
| Set properties for storage devices. |
| View device configurations and add new device
drivers. |
| Manage applications and services. |
| You can view local users and groups. (administrator
is a user with full privileges on the PC. When you are not an
administrator, you don't get privileges for installing hardware, software
and making many other administrative changes to the PC. So in an event a
user need to be given less rights than the administrator, user needs to
be made a normal user from within this section. |
Windows
Messenger : windows messenger is
an internet instant messenger program with the following capabilities.