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This document does not pretend to be an exaustive description of how to use your computer. Moreover, it is presented as a quick start guide that can be referred to by extreme novices who are unwilling to spend the time or effort to pursue these basic topics on their own, either through personal exploration, reading a book, enrolling in a class, or listening (and remembering) when the issue is personally discussed with me. You may wish to bookmark or print this page. In the event that you as of yet not familiar with the process of bookmarking a page, write the address down on a piece of paper. Hopefully by the time you've read this document you'll know how to book mark a page.
The first thing to understand about your computer is that it has a variety of types of memory in it. The most important types of memory to be familiar with is RAM (Random Access Memory) and Hard Drive (or hard disc) storage. RAM is temporary, and when power is removed from the computer, the RAM contents are erased. Hard Drive storage, on the other hand, is permanent, and it's contents are only lost when the computer is specifically instructed to alter the hard drive's content, which is a common procedure. Access to information in RAM is typically on the order of 250,000 times faster than accessing information on the hard drive, but because of economics and electronics, it's not reasonable (as of this writing) to have more RAM capacity than it is to have more hard disc capacity.
In a nut shell, the computer stores information permanently on the hard drive, pulls it into RAM to actually use and/or modify the information, and writes it back to the hard disc if the information is changed, and the information's changes need to be permanently recorded. In this manner changes in information in your computer are "remembered" while the computer is not powered up and running.
Typically speaking, because of econominc and electronic factors, you will have far more hard drive space than RAM space. Part of the reason that hard drive space is so much cheaper than RAM space is the previously mentioned difference in access speed, the 250,000 number mentioned above. Thus, one of the many ways to make sure your computer operates as quickly as possible is to make sure that you have enough RAM for the types of applications you want to run. However, this isn't always economically feasible, which brings us to the next section of this document.
The computer must pull information and programs from the hard drive into RAM for the purpose of accessing and manipulating the information, and executing the programs. What happens when the computer needs to hold more information in RAM than the computer actually has RAM for? The computer turns around and treats a portion of the hard drive as RAM, swapping "pages" of information in and out of RAM to the hard drive as needed. In fact, this portion of the hard drive is referred to as the SWAP file. As mentioned previously, accessing information from the hard drive is much slower than accessing information in RAM, so if at all possible we would like to avoid using the swap space. Unfortunately, this isn't always possible. Some programs are large, and the amounts of information they sometimes manipulate are large, and if all of this adds up to more RAM than your computer has, you'll be swapping to your hard drive heavily, which will result in your computer moving at a snail's pace. This issue is naturally complicated if you run more than one program at a time, which is a common occurance. Again, the solution to this type of slow down (called a bottleneck) is to put more RAM in your system, or run less programs simulatenously. However, if you don't run large programs or many programs simultaneously, or only run them very infrequently, you may not wish to deal with the minor headache of installing more RAM.
So by now you should have a reasonable understanding of swap
space. It's space used on the hard drive to handle the "overflow"
of RAM. What happens when you need swap space and you don't have
much, if any, free space on your hard drive? You start getting
all kinds of bizarre problems, from dialog boxes saying your computer
doesn't have enough memory, to programs just refusing to start.
At this point, your solutions are to explore your hard drive and
make some free space by deleting unwanted files, to buy a larger
hard drive (not a trivial task to be sure), or learn to live in
the crippled situation. The first option is the most attractive,
although as time passes this task becomes more complex, and sooner
or later you'll settle for the second. It's beyond the scope of
this document (at present) to discuss your handling of the second
option; the next portion of this document offers some advice to
help you in performing the first option.
Tutorial: Cut, Copy, and Paste
http://web.aacpl.lib.md.us/staffdevelopment/ccp.htm
ISTG - Tutorial: Copy and Paste 101http://istg.rootsweb.com/guild/c_and_p.html
http://snow.utoronto.ca/Learn2/basics.html
Mastering The Net: An on-line tutorialhttp://www.guide.net.nz/mtn/ccp.html
This document does not pretend to be an exaustive description of how to use your computer. Moreover, it is presented as a quick start guide that can be referred to by novices. You may wish to bookmark or print this page. In the event that you as of yet not familiar with the process of bookmarking a page, write the address down on a piece of paper. Hopefully by the time you've read this document you'll know how to book mark a page.
Memory
The first thing to understand about your computer is that it has a variety of types of memory in it. The most important types of memory to be familiar with is RAM (Random Access Memory) and Hard Drive (or hard disc) storage. RAM is temporary, and when power is removed from the computer, the RAM contents are erased. Hard Drive storage, on the other hand, is permanent, and it's contents are only lost when the computer is specifically instructed to alter the hard drive's content, which is a common procedure. Access to information in RAM is typically on the order of 250,000 times faster than accessing information on the hard drive, but because of economics and electronics, it's not reasonable (as of this writing) to have more RAM capacity than it is to have more hard disc capacity.
In a nut shell, the computer stores information permanently on the hard drive, pulls it into RAM to actually use and/or modify the information, and writes it back to the hard disc if the information is changed, and the information's changes need to be permanently recorded. In this manner changes in information in your computer are "remembered" while the computer is not powered up and running.
Typically speaking, because of econominc and electronic factors, you will have far more hard drive space than RAM space. Part of the reason that hard drive space is so much cheaper than RAM space is the previously mentioned difference in access speed, the 250,000 number mentioned above. Thus, one of the many ways to make sure your computer operates as quickly as possible is to make sure that you have enough RAM for the types of applications you want to run. However, this isn't always economically feasible, which brings us to the next section of this document.
The computer must pull information and programs from the hard drive into RAM for the purpose of accessing and manipulating the information, and executing the programs. What happens when the computer needs to hold more information in RAM than the computer actually has RAM for? The computer turns around and treats a portion of the hard drive as RAM, swapping "pages" of information in and out of RAM to the hard drive as needed. In fact, this portion of the hard drive is referred to as the SWAP file. As mentioned previously, accessing information from the hard drive is much slower than accessing information in RAM, so if at all possible we would like to avoid using the swap space. Unfortunately, this isn't always possible. Some programs are large, and the amounts of information they sometimes manipulate are large, and if all of this adds up to more RAM than your computer has, you'll be swapping to your hard drive heavily, which will result in your computer moving at a snail's pace. This issue is naturally complicated if you run more than one program at a time, which is a common occurance. Again, the solution to this type of slow down (called a bottleneck) is to put more RAM in your system, or run less programs simulatenously. However, if you don't run large programs or many programs simultaneously, or only run them very infrequently, you may not wish to deal with the minor headache of installing more RAM.
So by now you should have a reasonable understanding of swap space. It's space used on the hard drive to handle the "overflow" of RAM. What happens when you need swap space and you don't have much, if any, free space on your hard drive? You start getting all kinds of bizarre problems, from dialog boxes saying your computer doesn't have enough memory, to programs just refusing to start. At this point, your solutions are to explore your hard drive and make some free space by deleting unwanted files, to buy a larger hard drive (not a trivial task to be sure), or learn to live in the crippled situation. The first option is the most attractive, although as time passes this task becomes more complex, and sooner or later you'll settle for the second. It's beyond the scope of this document (at present) to discuss your handling of the second option; the next portion of this document offers some advice to help you in performing the first option.
Exploring your PC or how files are stored on your computer.
As mentioned before, your hard disc is used to store information in the computer when the computer is turned off. The computer must have some manner of organizing this information, and it does so by storing information in files. Information that is related to each other, such as the email addresses in your address book, are typically stored in one file. The programs that run on the computer are themselves files, and they are special files in that they can be executed (or ran). Pictures are files; movies are files; music are files. It is sufficient to say that there are many types of files present on your computer, and it is far beyond the scope of this document to describe the very large number of file types that exist. The purpose of this document is to teach you how to find a specific file, and to move them around your computer so that you can find these files after you have downloaded or otherwise obtained them.
As the number of files present in any given computer is very large, there must be some way of classifying and locating these files. Indeed, there is a special type of file called a folder or directory (the two terms are synomous or interchangable), and a folder is in all actuallity nothing more than a file that can contain other files and folders. Yes, you read the correctly; a folder can contain other folders, a process known as "nesting". If you ever see the term "heirichcal directory structure" or "heirirchal file system" or something similar, it's this nesting attribute that is being described.
Though not previously mentioned in this document, this document is geared towards users of Microsoft's Windows Operating System. The topics apply to most other operating systems as well, but if you're running an advanced operating system, all of this information will be old-hat to you.
Earlier when I discussed hard drives, I may have led you to the impression that your system can contain only one of them. This is not the case; it can contain more than one. The maximum number that your computer can accomodate is an issue that varies from system to system, and is not worth discussing further other than to state that you can have more than one of them in your computer. For the purpose of indentification, the first hard drive in a system is referred to as the "C" drive, the second as the "D" drive, and so on. To further slightly complicate issues, a CD-ROM drive is very similar in nature to a hard drive, with the exception that they are usually slower than the hard drive, and are usually read only, meaning that you can not update information on the ROM (ROM actually stands for Read Only Memory). In this case, the CD-ROM drive also shows up as a letter. So, for example, if you have one hard disc and one CD-ROM in your system, the hard disc would be referred to as the "C drive", and the CD-ROM would be referred to as the "D drive." The term "C drive" and "C:" can be used interchangably, and the same follows for "D", "E", "F", and so one. Though it's not important for the purpose of this document, if your computer sits on a Local Area Network (LAN) it's possible that folders on other computers on the LAN could be mapped to your computer to show up as even more hard drives; this topic is fairly advanced and is not addressed at this point. What is important to understand is that each drive in the system has a unique name, the drive letter, that identifies it. In addition, the floppy drives present in your system are also treated in this manner, although they'll have the drive letters A, and if you have two floppy drives, there will be a letter B as well. Each and every disc present in the system will have a drive letter associated with it, which is important for navigating or exploring the disc and files on that disc.
Ok, we've discussed drive letters, and briefly touched upon nested file systems. It's time to take this a little further and actually do something with it. Again using Windows as an example, we proceed blindly ahead.
On your desktop, there should be an icon that is labeled "my computer". Right click on this, and then click on the explore option. A window will appear on the system that has two panes split vertically. The left pane contains your folder tree (a representation of the nested file system) and the right pane contains a list of items in the currently selected folder from the left pane. In the left pane, you'll see an icon with a C: to it's right; to the left of this icon should be a box with a plus sign ("+") in it; click on the plus sign. This will expand the display for the C: drive, and you'll see all of the folders that are at the first level of the drive. You may have to use the scroll bar that's located towards the middle of the window to scroll down the display a bit, but you should find an icon that looks like a folder that says "windows" beside it. Again, clicking on the plus sign beside the windows folder causes this folder to "expand", and you'll see the list of folders contained within the Windows folder. At this point, you'll again see that there are folders contained, or nested within, the windows folder. Notice in the left pane that there is a folder called "desktop". Click on it. You are now exploring, from drive C:, the folder Desktop, contained within the Windows subdirectory. The common manner in which this location is specified is "C:\Windows\Desktop"; notice that the slashes go from the upper left to lower right, and these types of slashes are actually properly referred to as backslashes. The distinction between backslashes and normal slashes is important; Microsoft in their infinite wisdom decided to use back slashes to seperate directory names, as to avoid legal issues with Unix, which uses forward slashes. Since the internet is "fathered" by Unix and not Microsoft, forward slashes (or just plain slashes) are used for Internet addresses; this distinction is very important.
So now we have an explorer window open, and we are exploring C:\Windows\Desktop. Look in the right pane of the explorer window. Notice the files listed there. Now minimize the explorer window (by clicking on the middle box in the upper right hand corner of the explorer window). If you have any other windows open, minimize them as well. Now look at the icons on your desktop. Do you notice any similarity between the icons and their names as compared to the list that was in the right pane of the explorer window? You should; the icons, files, and folders that are on your desktop are contained in C:\Windows\Desktop, and this should be listed in the explorer window that you just minimized. You may find it interesting to explore C:\Windows\Start, C:\Program Files, and/or C:\Windows\Start\Startup.
Now we have a basic understanding of how to explore the computer's
file system. How does this help me locate files or clean up my
hard drive?
