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...