COMPUTER BASICS Page 5 - Software In Depth A discussion on software can be grouped into two main areas: Operating Systems and Applications. Operating Systems As mentioned previously, Windows is the OS that is by far the most common, so we will concentrate on it. The development of Windows has been a long and colorful one, where other systems like the MAC, Linux, OS2 and others long claimed technical superiority, and possibly are, yet Windows always outsold them 100 to 1. Windows continues to be complex to learn, although it certainly does things a lot better now than it did at one time. Windows did have a version 1, but it was not until version 3.0 that it started to show promise. A number of radical changes were made when Windows 95 came out, many of which are still in use today. Windows 98 was the probably the most popular version, still used by a lot of people today due to its relative ease of use. However that ease of use came at a price, mostly in lack of security and privacy. Most of these issues were rectified with Windows XP, but those changes made the OS more difficult to configure properly. That is where this discussion will focus, as this is often one of the most confusing to the average user. With Windows 98, no matter who signed on to the computer, it always looked the same, and when you saved a file, they always went to the same place by default, the My Documents folder on the hard drive, usually known as Drive C. However, XP introduced the concept of separate user profiles, where different users can sign on to the PC, and have their own My Documents folder, their own desktop settings, printer settings and so on. User Profiles When the XP Operating System is first installed, it creates two user profiles, the Administrator account, and one other that it will ask you for a name for during the installation. Usually this will be your own name. Both of these accounts, and any others that you set up, will have their own settings, their own desktops, their own My Documents folders and so on. All of these settings are kept in a folder called Documents and Settings. The graphic above shows the folder stucture of a new installation of XP. On the left we see that Drive C, the main hard drive, has the folder called Documents and Settings, with the sub folders named for the two users created so far, Administrator and Mike A, both created during the installation. Administrator is selected, and on the right you will see the folders that he has entitled Administrator's documents, Desktop, Start Menu and so on. These folders contain only the documents, screen elements and menu items for that single user. If we clicked on Mike A, we would see the same kind of structure. All Users and Default User. The All Users folder is used to hold any destop settings or similar items that will be common to ALL users of this PC. For example, any item that exists in the Desktop folder of a single user will show up as an icon of some sort on the person's desktop. If your own user profiles Desktop folder held a link to a program that you wanted ALL persons to have on their desktops, you could move it from your Desktop folder into the All Users Desktop folder. It's actually more complicated to explain than it is to do. The Default User Folder contains a template of what any new users would get when they are created and sign on for the first time. If your PC was going to be used by a lot of people, and you wanted to make sure they all had a certain setting before they had even logged on to the PC for the first time, you could make a change to the Default User setting, and they would get that change automatically. Want to learn more about Windows? Many books have been written on the subject, and it is too vast a topic to cover it all here. Please check out our Computer Links page for links to a number of sites where you can read about Windows for years to come.