Chapter 5

Lets get it together. 

The desktop. The single most important part of the computer. Except it isn't. Because you can turn it off and use the start button. So quite a crap intro really. 

Only I rarely use the start button. I rarely use desktop icons either. I have another trick up my sleeve which I shall let you into later, but first.

You see that desktop you have? You should have a few icons dotted around? Well as you install more software, those icons will slowly take up the real estate. What do you have so far? 

• Computer/My Computer: This icon is pretty essential. This is the main navigation button for your computer. If the file is anywhere on your computer it can and will be found here.
• Trashcan/recycle: The 'oh shit' folder. I highly recommend you keep this. If you delete a file, it ends up here. If you find you have deleted it by accident, then you can rummage around and fetch it back out. 
• My Documents: The default folder for anything you save. Good because it keeps it all in one location, bad because it keeps it all in one location. 

These icons are pretty much standard across all computers. Depending on where you got your computer from, you may have some of the following:

• Network/Homegroup:  This is the icon that opens up network connections, and allows you to access files on other computers.
• <Manufactures name> help: Usually, the company that supplies the computer will fill your hard drive with loads of useless crap. This is usually the place they put it. The only useful thing you will ever need in here, if it's in here, is the restore factory settings program. If you have your own windows disc, then this isn't a problem. If the computer came with Windows installed, and they did not give you a full copy of Windows on a disc, then I suggest you buy a copy of Windows. (I will explain more later)
• Some anti virus program: If you did what I said in the previous chapter, then this should be AVG free: If not, then find the program and remove it before installing AVG free. Usually, manufacturers put some overpriced crap, or a crap version of overpriced crap hoping you are stupid enough to pay for the full version of the overpriced crap. For 99% of average home users, you will not benefit from a paid anti virus software. AVG is perfectly capable of preventing 99% of the virus problems you will encounter.
• Printer: If your computer is the only one in the house with a printer attached to it, then you don't need this icon here. If however, you have several computers in the house, all networked, and a couple of printers connected, then it can be handy to have an icon for each printer so you can drag and drop the file to be printed onto the chosen printer. If you don't understand what I just said, then you don't need a printer icon on the desktop.

So how do you keep it tidy and icon free? The same principal for housing. As streets gets crowded, you need more space, what do you do? Create another layer or add floors to the buildings. Or with computers, you create folders.
So a busy desktop can be made to look sweet and clean:

Before

After

If it looks weird, that's because my desktop covers 2 monitors. The right one is my main monitor hence why all the icons are on there.
Doesn't it look much neater with all the icons tucked away?
Yeah, the folders are full of icons now but time for another little trick.
Now I am not sure if this will work, but I really hope so so here we go:
If you look in the bottom right corner, next to the system tray, there is a button marked 'desktop'. This is a pop up menu that allows you to manipulate the desktop like you can the folders in the start menu.

If you click on the '>>' part, a pop up menu happens thus:

This then allows you to access all the desktop folders, and the contents inside in a nice, alphabetical manner and keeping your desktop tidy. In fact, once you get the hang of this, you can even turn the desktop icons off altogether, leaving your wallpaper free for you to enjoy.

I keep all my icons in 2 folders. Games and Utilities. Games is for games, naturally. And utilities are for anything that is system bases or productive. The other icons you can see in that list are ones hidden by default, or temporary folders. For example the 'Donna's Backup' is a copy of a laptop hard drive I am fixing for someone. I am just waiting on parts before I copy it back after giving it a fresh windows install. The sharing folder, is a folder I created to pass files onto computers on my network running XP. Again, I am not a qualified expert on computers, I am largely self taught. But I struggled to find a nice way to network Windows 7 and XP together. So for XP to get files from 7, I put the files in that folder. Crude, but it works. The 2 images are ones I have used in this blog, and they will be shifted to archive once I finish writing. I always put Work in Progress on the desktop, then store it when I am finished.

So now I open up to you. If you have any questions or queries you would like to ask me, tweet them to me @theclunk or leave me a message here.
They could be about me, or about my computer, any problems you may have? Ask me for recommendation's, anything really. If I can help, I will.

All the best.

Chapter 4

Now what?

OK, so you have your wonderful new computer home, its all connected up, now what?

Turn it on of course. Press that big round button on the front, watch as the Windows logo flashes before your eyes. Some new computers will have some kind of registration screen. Fill in the details here and follow the prompts until the desktop shows itself and awaits you to dirty it. 

Now a lot of ISP's will send you a disc with their router and tell you to use it to install the router. Don't bother. Most of the stuff on there is pretty much useless. If you have a router, and the patch lead, just plug it in. The computer will do the rest. Within 30 seconds you have internet.  

Now the first thing I recommend you do before anything else is use windows update. Keep updating till you can update no more.

The second thing I recommend is defrag the hard drive.
Defrag is such a dirty word to me, as it is often something people are told to do by helpline call centres and people who don't have a fucking clue about computers. But on a fresh windows install, in my mind, it is essential. 

• Technical bit. Feel free to skip to next paragraph:
  I will try and describe in laymans terms what a defrag actually does.
  Imagine if you will that your hard drive is a library. Imagine that there is a shelf, the first shelf you come to, and it is rammed solid with books. Everything from phone books to the local takeaway menu. Each book represents a file on your hard drive. Now how the file system works is this:
  When you delete a file, imagine that a book is taken out. Lets say you have deleted an email. Imagine that the email is a menu for 'burgers are us'. The computer takes that menu off the shelf, and throws it away. Now lets say you want to install a large program. For example, photoshop. Imagine that photoshop is a local telephone directory. What windows does is it searches for the first space in the hard drive. In this case, where the menu was. Obviously the space is not big enough. But Windows is a bit anal about this, so what it does is take as much as the phone book as possible, and ram it into that space. Once the space is full, it looks for the next space. Rams as much in there as possible, and so on until the whole file is stored.
  What defrag does is goes around the library, looking for all these part books, and fits them together so its a whole book again.
• Upside: Files are together, quicker to load, and more larger space is created:
• Downside: Time consuming, increases wear and tear alarmingly. (1 hour of defrag is equal to a months average hard drive use in normal circumstances) and can actually cause file curroption if used too often. 
• Do we understand? Good, then lets continue.

 The reason I say do a defrag now is quite simple. During a windows install, (or any program for that matter) the files are copied to the hard drive, then re-arranged as they are being decompressed, opened and installed. Believe me, a defraggle image on a hard drive with just windows installed has quite a lot of holes in it.

Now at this point, a lot of unseasoned people will be going on about no anti virus software, and being connected to the internet. So? There is no need for it just yet. You have only visited the windows update page, and I highly doubt that a Microsoft website will be compromised. You are safe at the moment.

Next thing to do is look at any software that may of came bundled with the computer. If it has any kind on anti virus software on there then uninstall it now. If you get any kind of pop up before this point telling you about it, just close the window with the red X in the top corner. With a lot of computers I have seen and worked on, bundled antivirus is a pain in the arse. You get 30 days then you get pop ups every 5 mins telling you to pay for it at a cost of £30 a year. On one computer the antivirus refused to be uninstalled until you bought it. I had to edit the registry and manually remove the program by extracting the hard drive, and connecting it to Bertha. There may of been an easier way, but at the time I didn't see one. So remove it now. There are plenty of free antivirus software programs online. I personally recommend AVG and I install it on every computer I build and I recommend it to everyone I need to. When you go to the AVG page, it will usually divert you to the cnet website to download. This is ok. So install and run AVG and let it scan.

Firewalls: Do you have a router supplied by your ISP? Then don't bother with one. The windows firewall is good enough. As a home user, it is very, very unlikely that a hacker will try and hack his way onto your computer unless you are Prince William, a bank manager, or a very well known rich man. There is no benefit to them spending half hour to hack Miss Jenny Jones, 131 Acia avenue, Little Bottomwood, Surreyshire, PI55 0FF, who is a single mum, with 32 kids, a 1994 Mondeo and £12.83 in the bank.
However, it is possible that you inadvertently download and activate a virus that will send hackers info from your hard drive. I will cover this in a later chapter.

Once this is done, you are pretty much ready to use the computer.
Start by installing any software you need. (printer drivers, mobile phone software, etc..)
Once that is done, I recommend having order to your desktop. There is nothing worse than having dozens of icons on the desktop, then spending hours looking for an icon you need.

In the next chapter, I will breifly touch on organising your desktop and keeping it tidy.

All the best.