Computer Beginner Guide

For many years, networking was the private playground of IT panjandrums. Its obscure lingo and arcane hardware were familiar to only this small coterie of computer cognoscenti. Workers who needed access to network resources had to pay obeisance to these powers-that-be, genuflecting in just the right way, tossing in the odd salaam or two. Lately, however, we've seen a democratization of networking. Thanks to the trend away from mainframes and toward client/server setups, thanks to the migration from dumb terminals to smarter PCs, and thanks to the advent of easy peer-to-peer setups, networking is no longer the sole province of the elite. Getting connected to an existing network, or setting up your own network in a small office or home office, has never been easier. This is particularly true with Windows Vista, which comes with a completely revamped network architecture that's designed to make networking with Vista easier and more robust. The Network Center Windows

Before you start inking with Vista, you'll probably want to configure a few settings, and Vista offers quite a few more than XP. Your starting point is the Control Panel's Mobile PC windowspecifically, the renamed Tablet PC Settings icon (formerly Tablet and Pen Settings). In the Tablet PC Settings dialog box that appears, the General tab is basically the same as the old Settings tab, and the Display tab is identical to its predecessor. However, there is a new Handwriting Recognition tab that has two sections: Personalization - You can provide Vista with samples of your handwriting. This increases the accuracy of the handwriting recognizer (the feature that converts handwritten text into typed text), but only when the Use the Personalized Recognizer check box is activated. Automatic Learning - This feature collects information about your writing, including the words you write and the style in which you write them. Note that this applies not only to your

When you use a Tablet PC's digital pen as an input device, there will often be times when you don't want to convert the writing into typed text. A quick sticky note or journal item might be all you need for a given situation. However, in plenty of situations you need your handwriting converted into typed text. Certainly, when you're using the Input Panel, you always want the handwriting converted to text. However, the convenience and usefulness of handwritten text is directly related to how well the handwriting recognizer does its job. If it misinterprets too many characters, you'll spend too much time either correcting the errors or scratching out chunks of text and starting again. Rather than just throwing up their hands and saying "That's life with a Tablet PC," Microsoft's developers are doing something to ensure that you get the most out of the handwriting recognizer. Windows Vista comes with a new tool called Handwriting Personaliz

In the "old days," working on a document usually meant pulling out a blank sheet of paper, taking up a pen (or some other writing instrument), and then writing out your thoughts in longhand. Nowadays, of course, this pen-and-paper approach has been almost entirely superseded by electronic document editing. However, there are still plenty of situations in which people still write things out in longhand: Jotting down an address or other data while on the phone Taking notes at a meeting Recording a list of things to do while visiting a client Creating a quick map or message to be faxed Sketching out ideas or blueprints in a brainstorming session Unfortunately, for all but the most trivial notes, writing on paper is inefficient because, in most cases, you eventually have to put the writing into electronic form, either by entering the text by hand or by scanning the document. What the world has needed for a long time is a way to bridge the gap between purely

Here's a scenario that's all too familiar for a lot of us: You're on your way to an offsite meeting, and when you arrive at the building, you forget which conference room you're supposed to go to. You have the information with you, but it's stored in your calendaring program on your notebook. You have no choice but to boot your computer, load your calendar, get the info you need, and then shut everything down again. No one likes to power up a computer just to check a quick factit wastes both time and battery power. To avoid this, many people simply write whatever important information they need on a sticky note and attach it to the outside of the notebook, but how low-tech can you get? Here's another scenario: You're waiting in an airport lounge and want to listen to music or catch up on some podcasts, but there's no AC outlet available. How do you listen to the audio without draining your battery entirely? One solution is to configure Windo

Notebook computers used to occupy very specific and unalterable niches in the computing ecology. Sales professionals didn't leave home without them, executives on business trips routinely packed their portables, and corporate employees without a personal machine lugged a laptop home to do some extra work. In each case, though, the notebook computerwith its cramped keyboard, hard-to-read LCD display, and minuscule hard diskwas always considered a poor substitute for a desktop machine. For many years, it seemed that notebooks were doomed to remain among the lower castes in the social hierarchy of personal computers. But recent developments have caused notebooks to shed their inferiority complex. Today's luggables have impressive 1024x768 (or better) displays, tens of gigabytes of hard disk real estate, and built-in wireless capabilities. Add a couple of PC card slots, connectors for full-size keyboards and monitors, and maybe even a docking station, and suddenly your

The security features you've seen so far are certainly worth the price of admission and should be enough to make Vista the most secure Windows OS yet. But Microsoft has more security tricks up its sleeve. The next few sections take you on a quick tour of the most important or interesting of the rest of Vista's new security innovations. If you could map out the Windows attack surface, the biggest feature in the resulting landscape would be, by far, the system and third-party services that run in the background. Services are a tempting malware target for two reasons. First, most services are "always on," in the sense that they start when Windows loads and then remain running until you shut down the system. Second, most services run with a high privilege level that gives them full access to the system. Malware that manages to get into a computer can use the system services to perform almost any task, from installing a Trojan horse to formatting the hard driv

Most (I'm actually tempted to say the vast majority) of the security-related problems in recent versions of Windows boiled down to a single root cause: Most users were running Windows with administrator-level permissions. Administrators can do anything to a Windows machine, including installing programs, adding devices, updating drivers, installing updates and patches, changing Registry settings, running administrative tools, and creating and modifying user accounts. This is convenient, but it leads to a huge problem: Any malware that insinuates itself onto your system will also be capable of operating with administrative permissions, thus enabling the program to wreak havoc on the computer and just about anything connected to it. Windows XP tried to solve the problem by creating a second-tier account level called the limited user, which had only very basic permissions. Unfortunately, there were three gaping holes in this "solution": XP prompted you to crea

As more people, businesses, and organizations establish a presence online, the world becomes an increasingly connected place. And the more connected the world becomes, the more opportunities arise for communicating with others, doing research, sharing information, and collaborating on projects. The flip side to this new connectedness is the increased risk of connecting with a remote user whose intentions are less than honorable. It could be a fraud artist who sets up a legitimate-looking website to steal your password or credit card number, a virus programmer who sends a Trojan horse attached to a program download, or a website operator who uses web browser security holes to run malicious code on your machine. Admittedly, online security threats are relatively rare and are no reason to swear off the online world. However, these threats do exist and people fall victim to them every day. Luckily, protecting yourself from these and other e-menaces doesn't take much effort

I've been troubleshooting Windows PCs for many years. It used to be that most problems were caused by users accidentally deleting system files or making ill-advised attempts to edit the Registry or some other important configuration file. Recent versions of Windows (particularly XP) could either prevent these kinds of PEBCAK (Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard) issues or recover from them without a lot of trouble. However, I think we're all too well aware of the latest menace to rise in the past few years, and it has taken over as the top cause of desperate troubleshooting calls I receive: malware, the generic term for malicious software such as viruses and Trojan horses. The worst malware offender by far these days is spyware, a plague upon the earth that threatens to deprive a significant portion of the online world of its sanity. As often happens with new concepts, the term spyware has become encrusted with multiple meanings as people attach similar ideas

If you access the Internet using a broadbandcable modem or DSLservice, chances are, you have an always-on connection, which means there's a much greater chance that a malicious hacker could find your computer and have his way with it. You might think that with millions of people connected to the Internet at any given moment, there would be little chance of a "script kiddy" finding you in the herd. Unfortunately, one of the most common weapons in a black-hat hacker's arsenal is a program that runs through millions of IP addresses automatically, looking for live connections. The problem is compounded by the fact that many cable systems and some DSL systems use IP addresses in a narrow range, thus making it easier to find always-on connections. When a cracker finds your address, he has many avenues with which to access your computer. Specifically, your connection uses many different ports for sending and receiving data. For example, web data and commands typ

Fixing computer problems is only as effective and as reliable as your diagnosis of the problem in the first place. Without an accurate diagnosis, you can't hope to effect a proper repair or recovery. It's also true that a diagnosis need not only be an after-the-unpleasant-fact task. Instead of waiting to deal with computer difficulties after they've occurred (what I call pound-of-cure mode), it would be great if users' diagnostics could tell them about potential problems in advance (call it Ounce of Prevention mode). Windows Vista comes with new diagnostic toolstogether, they're called the Windows Diagnostic Infrastructure (WDI) that not only do a better job of finding the source of many common disk, memory, and network problems, but that can also detect impending failures and alert you to take corrective or mitigating action (such as backing up your files). Disk Diagnostics A hard disk can suddenly bite the dust thanks to a lightning strike, an accide

Few things in this life are as frustrating as an operating system that won't operate, either because Windows itself has given up the ghost or because some program has locked up solid and taken Windows down with it. Unfortunately, computer problems, like the proverbial death and taxes, seem to be one of those constants in life. Fortunately, each new version of Windows seems to be a little more stable and a little better at handling misbehaving programs than its predecessor, so at least we're heading in the right direction. It's still early, but it looks as though Windows Vista is continuing this positive trend. Vista will ship with a passel of new tools and technologies designed to prevent crashes and to recover from them gracefully if they do occur. The next few sections take you through the most important of these stability improvements. I/O Cancellation If you've used Windows for a while, you've probably come across a Windows Error Reporting dialog b