4 Foolish Assumptions
On the other hand, if you know a topic pretty well but want to make sure
you’ve caught all the high points, read the paragraphs marked with icons
and make sure that information registers. If it doesn’t, glance at the sur-
rounding text.
Sidebars stand as “graduate courses” for those who are curious about a spe-
cific topic — or stand knee-deep in muck, searching for a way out.
Foolish Assumptions
I don’t make many assumptions about you, dear reader, except for the fact
that you’re obviously intelligent, well-informed, discerning, and of impecca-
ble taste. That’s why you chose this book, eh?
Okay, okay. Least I can do is butter you up a bit. Here’s the straight scoop.
If you’ve never used Windows before, bribe your neighbor (or, better, your
neighbor’s kids) to teach you how to do three things:
✦ Play Solitaire
✦ Get on the Web
✦ Shut down Windows and turn off the computer
That covers it. If you can play Solitaire, you know how to turn on your com-
puter, use the Start button, click, drag, and double-click. After you’re on the
Web, well, heaven help us all. And if you know that you need to click the
Start icon in order to Stop, you’re well on your way to achieving Dummy
Enlightenment.
And that begins with Book I, Chapter 1.
Organization
Windows Vista All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies contains nine mini-
books, each of which gives a thorough airing of a specific topic. If you’re
looking for information on a specific Windows topic, check the headings in
the Table of Contents or refer to the Index.
By design, this book enables you to get as much (or as little) information
as you need at any particular moment. Want to know how to jimmy your
Minesweeper score to amaze your boss and confound your co-workers?
Organization 5
Look at Book I, Chapter 5. Want to activate Vista’s outbound firewall?
Try Book II, Chapter 2. Also by design, Windows Vista All-in-One Desk
Reference For Dummies is a reference that you reach for again and again
whenever some new question about Vista comes up.
Here are the nine minibooks, and what they contain:
Book I: A Vista Orientation: What Windows can and can’t do. What’s inside
a PC, and how Windows controls it. Do you really need Vista? Which of the
eight (!) versions is right for you? How do you upgrade?
Book II: Vista Boot Camp: How to get Vista working right. Adding users —
with a particular nod to security. Manipulating files. Using the Windows
taskbar and shortcuts. Getting help. The care and feeding of hard drives.
Using the built-in applications for word processing and image manipulation.
Book III: Securing Vista: A look at the Security Center. Windows Firewall.
Using the Microsoft Management Console snap-in to monitor outbound
traffic. Automatic Updating and when to avoid it. Virus Protection — free.
What the bad guys already know, and what you can do about it.
Book IV: Customizing Vista: Cranking up the Sidebar and getting gadgets.
Glass. Personalizing the desktop with themes, colors, backgrounds, and the
like. Mouse Pointers. Screen Savers. Changing the Start menu. Using the
Quick Launch toolbar. Beating Vista’s games, the sneaky way.
Book V: Vista on the Internet: Why you really need broadband. Logging into
your computer from the Internet. Internet Explorer. RSS feeds. Dealing with
popups. Blogging for fun and prophet. Managing passwords. Windows Mail,
Windows Live Mail, and more. Working the newsgroups. Messaging outside
the Microsoft sphere.
Book VI: Adding Cool Hardware: The iPod vs. Vista — and better alternatives
elsewhere. Cameras, scanners, printers, audio, memory, USB key drives,
monitors, and more. Choosing the right products and getting them to work.
Book VII: Joining the Multimedia Mix: Podcasting tricks and traps.
Windows Media Player. Plays for sure (yeah, sure). Ripping from audio
CDs. Burning your own CDs and DVDs. Capturing Windows Media streams.
Digital licensing and what you can do to thwart Microsoft’s encroaching
lockdowns. Windows Movie Maker, digital cameras, camcorders, and other
video devices. “Unshaking” your movies. Printing and sharing pictures.
Converting file formats. Photo Gallery.
6 Icons
Book VIII: Vista Video: Do you have what it takes? How to pick a good Media
Center PC. Installation and set up. Running Media Center for you and me.
Burning video DVDs — and the traps.
Book IX: Setting Up a Vista Network: Concepts behind peer-to-peer and
client/server networking. How to build your own network quickly, easily, and
reliably. Wi-Fi and other ethereal wireless topics. Protecting your network
and your privacy.
Icons
Some of the points in Windows Vista All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies
merit your special attention. I set those points off with icons.
When I’m jumping up and down on one foot with an idea so absolutely cool I
can’t stand it anymore, that’s when I stick a Tip icon in the margin. You can
browse through any chapter and hit the very highest points by jumping from
Tip to Tip.
Pssssst. Want to know the real story? Not the stuff Microsoft’s Marketing
Droids want you to hear, but the kind of information that’ll give you some
insight into this lumbering beast in Redmond? You’ll see it all next to this
icon, and on my eponymous Web site.
You don’t need to memorize the stuff marked with this icon, but you should
try to remember that there’s something special lurking about.
Achtung! Cuidado! Thar be tygers here! Any place you see a Warning icon, you
can be sure that I’ve been burnt — badly — in the past. Mind your fingers.
These are really, really mean suckers.
Okay, so I’m a geek. I admit it. Sure, I love to poke fun at geeks. But I’m a
modern, new-age sensitive guy, in touch with my inner geekiness. Sometimes
I just can’t help but let it out, ya know? That’s where the Technical Stuff icon
comes in. If you get all tied up in knots about techie stuff, pass these by.
(For the record, I managed to write this whole book without telling you that
an IP Address consists of a unique 32-bit combination of network ID and host
ID, expressed as a set of four decimal numbers with each octet separated by
periods. See? I can restrain myself sometimes.)
Where to Go from Here 7
There are also voluminous diversities in the various versions of Vista. (Say
that ten times really fast.) When a particular feature appears in, say Vista
Home Premium Edition, but it doesn’t appear in Vista Home Basic, I won’t
tag the difference with an icon, but I will mention that fact loud and clear.
If you find a feature that you can’t wait to try, make sure your version of
Vista supports it before you get too carried away.
Where to Go from Here
That’s about it. Time for you to crack the book open and have at it.
Don’t forget to bookmark my Web site, www.AskWoody.com. It’ll keep you
up to date on all the Windows Vista news you need to know — including
notes about this book, the latest Windows bugs and gaffes, patches that are
worse than the problems they’re supposed to fix, and much more — and
you can submit your most pressing questions, for free consultation from
The Woodmeister hisself.
See ya!
[email protected]
8 Windows Vista All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies
Book I
A Vista Orientation
Contents at a Glance
Chapter 1: Windows 4 N00bs ..............................................................................................11
Chapter 2: Vista versus the WinXPerienced ......................................................................27
Chapter 3: Choosing a Version ............................................................................................35
Chapter 4: Upgrades and Clean Installs ..............................................................................43
Chapter 1: Windows 4 N00bs
In This Chapter
A newbie’s quick guide
Why hardware’s hard . . . and software’s hard, too
Windows’ place in the grand scheme of things
Those computer words all the grade-schoolers understand
Buying a Vista computer
D on’t sweat it. We all started out as N00bs (“newbies”).
All those high-fallutin’ technical words you have to memorize, eh?
So you’re sitting in front of your computer, and this thing called Windows
Vista is staring at you. The screen you see — the one with the people’s
names on it — is called a Welcome screen, but it doesn’t say “Welcome” or
“Howdy” or even “Sit down and get to work, bucko.” It only has names and
pictures for people who can use the computer. Why do you have to click
your name? What if your name isn’t there? And why in the %$#@! can’t you
bypass all this garbage, log on, and get your e-mail?
Good for you. That’s the right attitude.
Windows Vista ranks as the most sophisticated computer program ever
made. It cost more money to develop and took more people to build than
any previous computer program, ever. So why is it so blasted hard to use?
Why doesn’t it do what you want it to do the first time? For that matter, why
do you need it at all?
Someday, I swear, you’ll be able to pull a PC out of the box, plug it into the
wall, turn it on, and get your e-mail — bang, bang, bang, just like that, in
ten seconds flat. In the meantime, those of us who are stuck in the early
21st century have to make do with PCs that grow obsolete before you can
unpack them, software that’s so ornery you find yourself arguing with it, and
Internet connections that surely involve turtles carrying bits on their backs.
12 Hardware and Software
If you aren’t comfortable working with Windows, and still worry that you
might break something if you click the wrong button, welcome to the club!
In this chapter, I try to present a concise school-of-hard-knocks overview of
how all this hangs together, and what to look for when buying a Vista PC.
It may help you understand why and how Windows has limitations. It also
may help you communicate with the geeky rescue team that tries to bail you
out, whether you rely on the store that sold you the PC, the smelly guy in the
apartment downstairs, or your eight-year-old daughter’s nerdy classmate.
Hardware and Software
At the most fundamental level, all computer stuff comes in one of two flavors:
hardware or software. Hardware is anything you can touch — a computer
screen, a mouse, a CD. Software is everything else: e-mail messages, that
letter to your Aunt Martha, pictures of your last vacation, programs like
Microsoft Office. If you have a roll of film developed and put on a CD, the
shiny, round CD is hardware — you can touch it — but the pictures them-
selves are software. Get the difference?
Windows Vista is software. You can’t touch it. Your PC, on the other hand, is
hardware. Kick the computer screen and your toe hurts. Drop the big box on
the floor and it smashes into a gazillion pieces. That’s hardware.
Chances are very good that one of the major PC manufacturers — Dell,
HP/Compaq, IBM/Lenovo, Acer, Gateway, Toshiba, and so on — made your
hardware. Microsoft, and Microsoft alone, makes Windows Vista. The PC
manufacturers don’t make Windows. Microsoft doesn’t make PCs, although it
does make other kinds of hardware — video game boxes, keyboards, mice,
and a few other odds and ends.
When you bought your computer, you paid for a license to use one copy of
Windows on the PC that you bought. The PC manufacturer paid Microsoft a
royalty so that it could sell you Windows along with your PC. You may think
that you got Windows from, say, Dell — indeed, you may have to contact Dell
for technical support on Windows questions — but, in fact, Windows came
from Microsoft.
When you first set up your PC, Windows had you click “I accept” to a licens-
ing agreement that’s long enough to wrap around the Empire State Building.
If you’re curious about what you accepted, a printed copy of the End User
License Agreement (EULA) is in the box that your PC came in or in the CD
packaging, if you bought Windows Vista separately from your computer.
If you can’t find your copy of the EULA, here’s how to retrieve it (and, at the
same time, get some experience using the instructions in this book as well as
finding your way around Vista’s Help system, which I talk about in Book II
Chapter 5):
Hardware and Software 13
1. Click the big round button in the lower-left corner of your screen. Book I
Chapter 1
I call that button the “Start” button because in Windows XP, it bore the
word Start. If you hover your mouse above the circle, a little box appears
Windows 4 N00bs
that says Start, too.
2. On the right, at the bottom, click Help and Support.
The Windows Help and Support center springs into view.
3. Type eula in the Search text box and press Enter.
Windows shows you one or more results for your inquiry (see Figure 1-1).
4. Click the Read the Microsoft Software License Terms link.
Windows brings up the EULA that you agreed to, back in your younger
and more naïve days.
Now you know who to blame, for sure.
Type the term for which you need help
Figure 1-1:
Recall what
you agreed
to in the End
User License
Agreement.
Start button Chase down the article here
14 Why Do PCs Have to Run Windows?
Why Do PCs Have to Run Windows?
Here’s the short answer: You don’t have to run Windows on your PC.
The PC you have is a dumb box. (You needed me to tell you that, eh?) To get
the dumb box to do anything worthwhile, you need a computer program
that takes control of the PC and makes it do things such as show Web pages
on the screen, respond to mouse clicks, or print résumés. An operating system
controls the dumb box and makes it do worthwhile things, in ways that mere
humans can understand.
Without an operating system, the computer can sit in a corner and count to
itself, or put profound messages on the screen, such as Non-system disk
or disk error. Insert system disk and press any key when
ready. If you want your computer to do more than that, though, you need
an operating system.
Windows is not the only operating system in town. The single largest competi-
tor to Windows is an operating system called Linux (pronounced LIN-uchs).
Some people (I’m told) actually prefer Linux to Windows, and the debates
between pro-Windows and pro-Linux camps can become rather heated.
The Mac operating system can run on PCs, but only on a special kind of PC.
Suffice it to say that, oh, 99 percent of all normal PC users stick with Windows.
You probably will, too.
Buying a Computer
Here’s how it usually goes. You figure you need to buy a new PC. So you
spend a couple of weeks brushing up on the details — bits and bytes and
kilobytes and megabytes and gigabytes — and comparison shopping.
You end up at your local Computers Were Us shop, and this guy behind the
counter convinces you that the absolutely best bargain you’ll ever see is sit-
ting right here, right now, and you’d better take it quick before somebody
else nabs it.
Your eyes glaze over as you look at yet another spec sheet and try to figure
out one last time whether a RAM is a ROM, how fast hard-drive platters spin,
and whether you need an ATA, SATA, SATA I, or SATA II. In the end, you figure
the guy behind the counter must know what he’s doing, so you plunk down
your plastic and pray you got a good deal.
The next Sunday morning you look in the paper and discover you could’ve
bought twice as much machine for half as much money. The only thing you
know for sure is that your PC is hopelessly out of date, and the next time
you’ll be smarter about the whole process.
Buying a Computer 15
If that describes your experiences, relax. It happens to everybody. Take solace Book I
in the fact that you bought twice as much machine for the same amount of Chapter 1
money as the poor schmuck who went through the same process last month.
Windows 4 N00bs
Here’s everything you really need to know about buying a Vista PC:
✦ Buy at least 1GB of memory; 2GB is better.
✦ You need a powerful video card with at least 128MB of memory, but
256MB (or more) is better.
✦ If you want to record TV shows on your PC, you need Vista Home
Premium or Ultimate (see Book I, Chapter 2), and a video input card
that’s Vista certified, and a Media Center compatible remote control.
✦ Get a high-quality monitor, a solid keyboard, and a mouse that feels com-
fortable. (I don’t like cordless mice, but I’m kinda crotchety anyway.)
✦ Everything else they try to sell ya pales in comparison.
In this section, I try to give you just enough information about the inner work-
ings of your PC so that you can figure out what you have to do with Windows.
The details can change from week to week. But these are the basics.
Inside the big box
The big box that your computer lives in is sometimes called a CPU, meaning
Central Processing Unit (see Figure 1-2). Right off the bat, you’re bound to
get confused, unless somebody clues you in on one important detail: The main
computer chip inside that big box is also called a CPU. I prefer to call the
big box “the PC” because of the naming ambiguity, but you have probably
thought of a few better names.
Monitor
"The PC"
Figure 1-2:
The big box.
Mouse
Keyboard
16 Buying a Computer
The big box contains many parts and pieces (and no small amount of dust
and dirt), but the crucial, central element inside every PC is the motherboard
(see Figure 1-3). Attached to the motherboard you find the following items:
✦ The processor or CPU: This gizmo does the main computing. It’s proba-
bly from Intel or AMD or one of their competitors. Processors are typically
rated by speed, measured in MHz (megahertz) or GHz (gigahertz, 1 GHz =
1,024 MHz). Vista runs like a slug on anything slower than 1 GHz.
Memory slots
Card slots
Figure 1-3:
The mother-
board sits in
the middle
of it all.
Expansion slots
If you’re buying a new computer, the speed really doesn’t mean much,
unless you’re designing airplane wings or reshooting Jurassic Park, or
unless you play a lot of games on your PC. Ignore the salesperson. If you
want to improve Vista performance, your money should go to more
memory (see the next item), a better video card, or a fast Internet
connection.
✦ Memory chips and places to put them: Memory is measured in megabytes
(1MB = 1,024 characters) and gigabytes (1GB = 1,024 MB). Windows
Vista can run on a machine with 256MB — I’ve done it — but Microsoft
recommends a minimum of 512MB (see www.microsoft.com/technet/
windowsvista/evaluate/hardware/vistarpc.mspx). Unless you
have an exciting cornfield to watch grow while Vista saunters along, aim
for 1GB or more. Most computers allow you to add more memory to
them, and boosting your computer’s memory to 2GB from 1GB makes
the machine much snappier, especially if you run memory hogs such as
Office, PageMaker, or Photoshop. If you leave Outlook open and work
with it all day, and run almost any other major program at the same
time, 1GB is a must, and 2GB isn’t overkill.
Buying a Computer 17
✦ Card slots (also known as expansion slots): Modern slots come in three Book I
flavors: PCI, AGP, and PCI Express. Don’t get too hung up on the alphabet Chapter 1
soup, but if you can get a few PCI Express slots, do so. Vista makes video
cards work hard, and PCI Express video cards generally give you the
Windows 4 N00bs
best bang for the buck. Or ruble.
✦ Lots of other stuff: You’ll never have to play with this other stuff, unless
you’re very unlucky.
Here are a few upgrade dos and don’ts:
✦ Don’t let a salesperson talk you into eviscerating your PC and upgrading
the CPU: A 3.0 GHz PC doesn’t run a whole lot faster than a 2.4 GHz PC.
✦ When you hit 2GB in main memory, don’t expect big performance
improvements by adding more memory.
✦ On the other hand, if you have an older video card, do consider upgrad-
ing it to a faster card, or one with 128MB or more memory. Vista will
soak it up.
✦ Instead of nickel-and-diming yourself to death on little upgrades, wait
until you can afford a new PC, and give away your old one.
If you decide to get more memory, have the company that sells you the
memory install it. The process is simple, quick, and easy — if you know what
you’re doing. Having the dealer install the memory also puts the monkey on
his back if a memory chip doesn’t work or a bracket gets snapped.
Screening
The computer monitor or screen — you may think of it as a hoity-toity TV —
uses technology that’s quite different from old-fashioned television circuitry.
A traditional TV scans lines across the screen from left to right, with hundreds
of them stacked on top of each other. Colors on each individual line vary all
over the place. The near-infinitely variable color on a TV combined with a
comparatively small number of lines makes for pleasant, but fuzzy, pictures.
By contrast (pun absolutely intended, of course), computer monitors, and
plasma and LCD TVs, work with dots of light, called pixels. Each pixel can
have a different color, created by tiny colored gizmos sitting next to each
other. As a result, computer monitors (and plasma and LCD TVs) are much
sharper than conventional TV tubes.
Most people set up Windows Vista to run at a resolution of 1280 x 1024
pixels — that is, their monitors show 1280 pixels across the screen, with
1024 running up and down. (Widescreen owners may try 2048 x 1024.)
You may have an older, smaller, or fuzzier monitor that can’t handle
1280 x 1024 — or you may have eyes that can’t take it. That’s okay:
Vista looks pretty good at 1024 x 768.
18 Buying a Computer
The more pixels you can cram on a screen — that is, the higher the screen
resolution — the more information you can pack on the screen. That’s impor-
tant if you commonly have more than one word-processing document open at
a time, for example. At a resolution of 800 x 600, two open Word documents
placed side by side look big but fuzzy, like caterpillars viewed through a
dirty magnifying glass. At 1280 x 1024, those same two documents look
sharp, but the text may be so small that you have to squint to read it.
A special-purpose computer called a graphics processor or GPU, stuck on
your video card, creates everything that’s shown on your computer’s screen.
The GPU has to juggle all the pixels and all the colors — so if you’re a gaming
fan, the speed of the GPU’s chip (and, to a lesser extent, the speed of the
monitor) can make the difference between a zapped alien and a lost energy
shield. If you want to experience Vista in all its glory, particularly the see-
through “glass interface,” you need a fast GPU with at least 128MB — and
preferably 256MB — of its own memory.
Computer monitors are sold by size, measured diagonally, like TV sets. Just
like TV sets, the only way to pick a good computer screen over a run-of-the-
mill one is to compare them side by side or to follow the recommendation of
someone who has.
Managing disks and drives
Your PC’s memory chips hold information only temporarily: Turn off the
electricity, and the contents of main memory go bye-bye. If you want to
reuse your work, keeping it around after the plug has been pulled, you have
to save it, typically on a disk. The following are the most common types of
disks and drives:
✦ Floppies: The 1.44MB floppy disk drives that were ubiquitous on PCs
for many years have bit the dust. There’s very little reason to buy one
nowadays. But . . .
✦ SD/xD/CF card memory: Even now, long after the demise of floppy
disks, many computer cases have drive bays built for floppies. Why not
use the open spot for a multifunction card reader? That way you can slip
a memory card out of your digital camera (or Dick Tracy wristwatch for
that matter) and transfer files at will. SD cards, xD, CompactFlash, memory
stick — whatever you have — the multifunction readers cost a pittance
and read almost everything. Including minds.
✦ Hard drives: Get the biggest, cheapest one(s) you can. Electronic pictures
swallow up an enormous amount of space, and the average teenager’s
music collection could easily consume as much storage as the first mis-
sion to the moon. Although it’s generally true that more expensive hard
drives are more reliable than cheaper ones, objective numbers are hard
to come by, and individual results can vary.
Buying a Computer 19
Speed doesn’t matter much unless you’re transferring enormous Book I
amounts of data. That said, you should still consider shelling out a few Chapter 1
extra shekels for the newer SATA II hard drive technology. For a whole
host of reasons, SATA II is rapidly replacing the older IDE (also called,
Windows 4 N00bs
confusingly, ATA) approach, with the old clunky IDE ribbon cables giving
way to sleek, thin, flexible SATA II ones.
Don’t be afraid to stick a hard drive in a box, and plug the box into your
computer via a USB cable. External hard drives run almost as fast as
internal hard drives, they can be picked up and moved on a whim — and
they don’t contribute to your computer’s heating problems.
If you buy a new hard drive, have the dealer install it. You have to worry
about lots of permutations and combinations, and it simply isn’t worth
the effort. Life’s too short.
✦ CD and DVD drives: Of course, these drives work with CDs and DVDs,
which can be filled with data or contain music or movies. CDs hold
about 700MB of data; DVDs hold 4GB, or six times as much as a CD; and
dual-layer DVDs hold about 8GB. Don’t sweat the details: Get a dual-layer
DVD+–RW drive, even if dual-layered disks are expensive. You can always
use your dual-layer drive to write single-layer DVDs (and CDs). And if
you’re scared about installing a new drive, get an external USB version:
Vista loves external DVD drives.
Many older audio CD players — like the one you may have in your car or
your home stereo — can play only CDs that are burned once. If you reburn
the CD, it won’t play, so for those machines, stick to CD-Rs instead of
reburnable CD-RWs.
If you intend to burn CDs or DVDs on a new computer and play them on a
CD or DVD player that you already own, it would behoove you to test-burn
a CD or DVD before you buy the computer. Many cheap DVD players can
handle a whole disc of MP3 files (that’s, oh, 50 to 100 hours of music) with
aplomb. Others — even expensive players — can’t see past the first file.
The only way to know for sure is to give it a whirl.
✦ USB flash drives: Treat them like lollipops. Half the size of a pack of
gum, and able to hold an entire PowerPoint presentation or two or six,
flash memory should be your first choice for external storage space or
for copying files between computers. Pop one of these guys in a USB slot
(see the next section in this chapter), and suddenly Windows Vista knows
it has another drive — except this one’s fast, portable, and incredibly
easy to use. Go for the cheapest flash drives you can find: Most of the
“features” on fancy key drives are just, uh, Windows dressing.
This list is by no means definitive: You can buy Jaz disks, Zip drives, and
recordable media that sing till the cows come home.
20 Buying a Computer
HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray
On the one side, you have Toshiba. On the other, If you have to choose between HD-DVD and
Sony. Round six (seven? eight?) of the old VHS- Blu-Ray, you should realize that there isn’t a
versus-Betamax battle. Two heavyweights hair’s-breadth of difference between the two,
duke it out for your bucks (and euros and yen), technologically: This is all about marketing, not
backing different approaches to the next gen- engineering. The best way to pick one over the
eration of high-capacity storage devices, the other? Until a clear winner emerges, go with
successor to the venerable DVD. The stakes? media cost. If Blu-Ray disks cost less than HD-
Billions of dollars in revenue and market domi- DVDs, you’ll save more in the long run with
nance for the next decade. Heady. Sony — and vice versa.
Making PC connections
Your PC connects to the outside world using a bewildering variety of cables
and connectors. The most common are as follows:
✦ USB (Universal Serial Bus) cables: These cables have a flat connector
that plugs into your PC. The other end is usually shaped like a D, but
different pieces of hardware have different terminators. (“I’ll be back . . .
Hasta la vista, baby . . .”) USB is the connector of choice for just about
any kind of hardware — printers, scanners, MP3 players, Palm/pocket
computers, portable hard drives, and even mice. If you run out of USB
connections on the back of your PC, get a USB hub with a separate
power supply and plug away.
✦ LAN cables (also known as CAT-5, CAT-6, and/or RJ-45 cables): These are
the most common kind of network connectors. They look like overweight
telephone plugs (see Figure 1-4). One end plugs into your PC, typically
into a NIC (Network Interface Card, pronounced nick), a network connec-
tor on the motherboard, or a network connector on a card that slides
into a port (a so-called “PC card” or “PCMCIA card”). The other end plugs
into your network’s hub (see Figure 1-5), switch, or possibly into a cable
modem, DSL box, router, or other Internet connection–sharing device.
Figure 1-4: RJ-45
The RJ-45
network
connector.
Buying a Computer 21
Book I
Figure 1-5: Chapter 1
A network Hub
hub.
Windows 4 N00bs
✦ PS/2 or mini-DIN connectors: These are round connectors with six pins
and a plastic hump that prevents you from getting the connector twisted
around in the wrong direction (see Figure 1-6). Commonly found on key-
boards and mice, it’s ancient technology that works great.
Figure 1-6:
A PS/2 or
mini-DIN
connector.
If you have a mouse and a keyboard, both with PS/2 connectors, but
your PC sports only one PS/2 slot, not to worry! Most cable manufac-
turers have Y connectors that allow you to attach two PS/2 devices to a
single port. Surprisingly, both the mouse and the keyboard can coexist
with nary a hiccup. Visit www.cablestogo.com.
More and more mice and keyboards are coming with USB connectors.
That’s too bad, really, because most computers don’t have enough
places to plug in USB connectors, and it’s a waste to take up USB slots
with the mouse and keyboard. You can solve the problem by buying
USB-to-PS/2 adapters, and plugging both mouse and keyboard into the
respective PS/2 slots on the computer.
✦ Parallel and serial ports: These are the long (parallel, 25-pin, with 13
pins on top and 12 on the bottom) and short (serial, 9-pin, 5 on top and
4 on the bottom) connections on the back of your computer. The serial
port is notoriously slow, and both kinds sometimes fall apart — which is
particularly disconcerting when you unscrew a connector and a nut falls
off inside your computer. If you have a choice, choose USB.
22 Buying a Computer
Futzing with sound
Chances are pretty good that you are running Vista on a PC with at least a
little oomph in the audio department. In the simplest case, you have to be
concerned about four specific sound jacks (or groups of sound jacks)
because each one does something different. Your machine may not have all
four (are you feeling inadequate yet?), or it may look like a patch board at a
Korn concert, but the basics are still the same.
Here’s how the four key jacks are usually marked, although sometimes you
have to root around in the documentation to find the details:
✦ Line in: A stereo input jack. Feeds a stereo audio signal into the PC. Use
this jack to get audio output from a cable box, TV set, radio, CD player,
cassette player, electric guitar, or some other audio-generating box into
your computer.
✦ Mike in: If you use a cheap microphone for Skype or some other VoIP
service that lets you talk long distance for free (see Book IV, Chapter 5),
plug in the microphone here. In a pinch, you can plug any of the “Line
in” devices into the “Mike in” jack — but you’ll probably only get mono
sound, not stereo.
✦ Line out: A stereo output jack that, in the simplest case, bypasses the
computer’s internal amplifier. If you don’t have fancy output jacks,
this is the source for the highest-quality sound your computer can
produce.
✦ Headphone or speaker out: Goes through the internal amplifier. Use this
jack for headphones or speakers, but avoid it in all other situations.
Fancy sound cards can have full Dolby DTS or THX 5.1 output (that’s left front,
center front, right front, left surround, right surround, and a subwoofer).
The 6.1 configuration adds a back-surround jack, and 7.1 uses two back sur-
rounds. Front panel output — where your sound card connects to jacks on
the front of your PC, possibly a panel in a hard drive bay — makes connec-
tions easy. With a sufficiently bottomless budget, you can make your living
room sound precisely like the 07L runway at LAX.
PC manufacturers love to extol the virtues of their advanced sound systems,
but the simple fact is that you can hook up a rather plain-vanilla PC to a
home stereo and get great sound. Just connect the “Line out” jack on the
back of your PC to the “Aux in” jack on your home stereo or entertainment
center. Voilà!
A Terminology Survival Kit 23
Book I
Chapter 1
Wireless keyboards and mice?
Windows 4 N00bs
No thank you. I’ve been trying to wean myself cursor better march in locked time. The signal-
off of keyboard and mouse cables for many strength-detecting and calibrating software
years, with little luck. Wireless contraptions skip offered with newer keyboards and mice doesn’t
and drop with alarming frequency — too much overcome wireless congenital defects, for me
for me to handle. When I press a key, I expect at least. If you prefer cables too, hey, don’t feel
a letter to appear; when I move my mouse, the like a Luddite.
A Terminology Survival Kit
Some terms pop up so frequently that you’ll find it worthwhile to memorize
them, or at least understand where they come from. That way, you won’t be
caught flatfooted when your first-grader comes home and asks whether he
can download a program from the Internet.
If you really want to drive your techie friends nuts, the next time you have a
problem with your computer, tell them that the hassles occur when you’re
“running Microsoft.” They won’t have any idea whether you mean Windows,
Word, Outlook, Live Messenger, MSN Search, Defender, Media Center, or any
of a gazillion other programs.
A program is software (see the first section in this chapter) that works on a
computer. Windows, the operating system (see the second section), is a
program. So are computer games, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word (which is
the word processor part of Office), Internet Explorer (the Web browser in
Windows), Windows Media Player, those nasty viruses you’ve heard about,
that screen saver with the oh-too-perfect fish bubbling and bumbling about,
and so on.
A special kind of program called a driver makes specific pieces of hardware
work with the operating system. For example, your computer’s printer has a
driver, your monitor has a driver, your mouse has a driver, and Tiger Woods
has a driver (several, actually, and he makes a living with them). Would that
we were all so talented.
Sticking a program on your computer, and setting it up so that it works, is
called installing the program.
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