1.What are resoulution settings and how can I change them?
2.What is a Portal?
3.How do I select a Printer?
4.How can I customize my desktop?
5.What can I do to prevent system crashes?
6.What are some common Internet error messages and what do they mean?
7.What are cookies? How can I delete them? Where are they stored on my machine?
8.How can I search the Internet more effectively?
9.How exactly does a virus behave and how can I detect if I have one on my computer?
10.What can make setting up a PC easier?
Printers, monitors, scanners, and other I/O devices are often classified as high resolution, medium resolution, or low resolution. The actual resolution ranges for each of these grades is constantly shifting as the technology improves.
The size of the monitor does not determine the screen resolution. The bigger the monitor, the bigger the screen resolution you can use. Everything gets smaller as the resolution goes up. That's because the monitor is displaying a larger number of pixels in the same screen space. The larger the resolution, the more you can fit on the screen. Web pages are almost always too large to fit on one screen, so a larger resolution is better.
To change your resolution settings, click on the Start button, Settings, Control Panel. Click on the Display icon, then click on the Settings tab.
Setting the number of colors is also important. The best practical resolution to use on the Web is 64,000 colors (High Color-16 bit). You can get near photographic quality using thousands of colors, and you'll find many web graphics look much better than when your display is set to only 256 colors.
2.What is a portal?
A portal is a site that incorporates a lot of different aspects of the Internet. Not only is it a search site, it also provides Internet services: email, chat rooms, free personal webpages, shopping, guides, etc. Yahoo and Excite are very good examples of portals.
The primary goal of most portals is to make navigation around the Internet as simple as possible for the user. Portals using Web pages for their user interface will, for instance, often include numerous hyperlinks on the front page.
There are two basic types of portals, horizontal and vertical. Yahoo is the best example of a horizontal portal. Horizontal portals usually are chock full of links to ease the user's navigation. A vertical portal tends to focus more on a specific subject area. An example of a vertical portal is Ebay.
3.How do I select a printer?
Selecting a printer does not need to be that difficult, providing you have a clear understanding of the user's printing needs. Following are a few questions you should ask yourself before buying a computer. The answers will help you single out the kind of printer you should be looking for.
4.How can I customize my desktop?
A desktop is what appears on your monitor every time you start windows. A desktop consists of pictures, called icons, that show cabinets, files, folders, and various types of documents. You can arrange the icons on the electronic desktop just as you can arrange real objects on a real desktop -- moving them around, putting one on top of another, reshuffling them, and throwing them away.
You can easily liven up your desktop by using a graphic image as wallpaper. Any bitmap image can be used as wallpaper. If the Active Desktop feature is enabled from Internet Explorer 4 or Windows 98, you can also use JPEG or GIF images.
The first step in changing your wallpaper is to check your screen resolution. You do this by opening the Display option in the Control Panel and click the Settings tab. Make sure the Colors box is set to High Color or True Color. If your color depth is set at 256 colors or less, your wallpaper will not look good.
The next step is finding an image to use as your wallpaper. The Web is filled with free, downloadable wallpaper. Also, any image you see in an Internet window can be used as wallpaper. All you have to do is right click on the picture then choose Save as Wallpaper from the shortcut menu. You can also select an image you have saved on your hard drive by opening the Display option in the Control Panel, selecting the Background tab and clicking the Browse button. The image you select should match your current screen resolution if you want it to fill your whole screen. If you do not want your icons to get lost in your image, the image you choose should be cropped smaller than your resolution so room will be left around the edges for your icons.
You can choose one of three ways to have your wallpaper displayed from the Background tab of the Display option in the Control Panel. Your three choices for displaying the image are Center, Tile, and Stretch. If you have selected an image that is going to fill your entire screen, choose Center. The Tile option should be selected if you want to display many copies of a small image over the entire screen. Stretch lets you take an image that almost fits your entire desktop and expand it to fill your entire screen.
5.What can I do to prevent system crashes?
Firstly, make sure you shut down your computer properly! If the power goes out, or the plug gets unplugged, or the reset button is pushed the operating system doesn't get a chance to put everything away nicely. Bits of open files get put in strange places. So the data files and programs which were open during a crash might not work properly. That's why newer computers automatically run a disk scanning program after an improper shutdown...to try to find and clean up any stray bits of files which got stuck in odd places. That's also why it's a good idea to reinstall a program which is acting strangely after a crash.
Another suggestion is to restart your computer before opening a program that is a big RAM user (like Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop) or after you've been in and out of a program several times, or when you've had a bunch of things going simultaneously. The reason for this is because of the way memory space is distributed. When you close a program, the space that was used in memory is still left and cannot be reused unless a program that takes less or the same amount of memory as the initial program did comes along. If the new program is bigger, it is forced to take up new memory space and the old memory space that wasn't large enough to hold the program is left unused. Eventually, if you open and close enough programs, there will not be enough contiguous space to open the next program. The computer will experience being "out of memory" (Even though everything else was put away and you have a great big 64 mb of RAM!) and will freeze or crash.
6.What are some common Internet error messages and what do they mean?
7.What are cookies? How can I delete them? Where are they stored on my machine?
Cookies are used on the Internet to pass some information to another system. The cookie is a text file saved in your browser's directory or folder and stored in RAM while your browser is running. Most of the information in a cookie is pretty mundane stuff, but some Web sites use cookies to store personal preferences. If you want to see what information is stored in your cookie file, use a text editor or a word processor to open a file called cookies.txt or MagicCookie in your browser's folder or directory.
Microsoft saves cookies into the "Temporary Internet Files" folder, a system folder that you can set the maximum size of (the default is 2% of your hard drive). Whether you use Netscape or Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE), your cookies are saved to a simple text file that you can delete as you please.
In order to do this properly, remember to close your browser first. This is because all your cookies are held in memory until you close your browser. So, if you delete the file with your browser open, it will make a new file when you close it, and your cookies will be back. Remember that deleting your cookie file entirely will cause you to "start from scratch" with every web site you usually visit. So, it may be preferable to open the cookies.txt file (in the case of Netscape) and remove only the entries you don't like, or go to the cookies folder (in the case of MSIE) and delete the files from servers you don't want.
8.How can I search the Internet more effectively?
The following are some tips that should help you out in your searches on the Internet.
Why is my browser version important? How do I upgrade?
If you are viewing pages with an older browser, then the colors will not appear normally, everything will be pushed to the left and some javascripting may not work. Most web sites are now designed to use the new browsers and by using an older browser (such as the one used by AOL 2.5 or Navigator 2.x), you are missing out on a lot.
To correct these problems, you need to upgrade your browser. There are usually no costs involved. To download an upgraded version of your current browser, simply visit the website of your particular browser (such as Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer or America Online.)
9.How exactly does a virus behave and how can I detect if I have one on my computer?
A virus is a computer program intentionally designed to associate itself with another computer program in a way that when the original program is run, the virus program is run as well, and the virus replicates itself by attaching itself to other programs. The virus associates itself with the original program by attaching itself to that program or even by replacing it, and the replication is sometimes in the form of a modified version of the virus program.
Viruses are malicious programs designed entirely for destruction and havoc. Viruses are created by people who either know a lot about programming or know a lot about computers. Once the virus is made it will generally be distributed through shareware, pirated software, e-mail, or other various ways of transporting data, once the virus infects someone's computer it will either start infecting other data, destroying data, over writing data, or corrupting software.
The most commonly used method of protecting against and detecting viruses is to purchase a third party application designed to scan for all types of viruses. Popular anti-virus software is McAfee Virus Scan, Norton and iRiS AntiVirus.
10.What can make setting up a PC easier?
First things first, when you purchase a new PC, keep everything! That means all of your paperwork, the boxes the equipment came in and all of the disks that came with your purchase. You never know when you may become in need of any of these materials in the future.
When it comes to actually setting up our personal computer, be sure to read all of the instructions carefully and completely before beginning your adventure. You should also make sure you invest in a surge protector. This is very important, as it will protect your computer against electrical damage. Don't plug your computer in without one!
While in the process of assembling your system, make sure all components, including your surge protector are turned off before you being plugging things in and connecting cables. Never force a cable into a connection which it does not fit. If it seems too tight, you either are attempting to plug the cable in at the wrong end or in the wrong spot!
Br sure to plug all the power cables into the surge protector, plug the surge protector into the wall, then turn the surge protector on. When you have connected to a power source, first turn the PC on, then the monitor and finally any peripherals.