COMP102 Tutorial #2 Basic Computer Usage

COMP102 Tutorial #2 Basic Computer Usage Marc Lanctot The Start Menu The Start Menu is usually located on the bottom-left part of your screen.

Accessing a Web Browser In Windows, the Internet Explorer (IE) web browser is installed by default. You can use it to access the World Wide Web. Click on the Start Menu, move the mouse pointer over the blue e icon, and click once. This will start IE and allow you to browse the WWW. It

is assumed, of course, that you have first connected to the Internet if you are not always connected.

Downloading and Installing Software We will download the Firefox program and install it. Firefox is a compelling alternative web browser. When you are in IE, click once on the text contained in the address bar and enter www.firefox.com.

Click on the GetFirefox.com link which is underline and highlighted, usually in blue.

Now click on the “Download Firefox” section in green. The term download refers to getting a file from the Internet. Uploading refers to sending a file to someone or some server on the Internet. You will be brought to a new page and a popup should appear in a few seconds.

Click on “Save” and another window should pop up.

When this window pops up, choose Desktop from the selection list at the top of the window. Then click on the “Save” button.

The program might take a few minutes to download...

When the download is 100% complete, click on the “Open” button. This will execute the program you have downloaded.

Before the installation wizard takes over, the program unpacks itself.

The first installation screen has a “Welcome to Firefox” heading and some information about the browser. For most installations, there are several steps. To proceed to the next step, you always have to press the “Next” button. So let’s do this here.

The second screen present the License Agreement. You must agree to the terms and conditions in this License before you can use Firefox. Read over the License, and the choose the “Accept ...” option. Then, click “Next”.

For simplicity, we will just install the Standard components, which is all most people need to use the browser.

The next screen states that the installer is ready to install the program. This is the last step before the actual copying of the files into the Windows system directories. We’re sure we want to do this, so let’s click “Next”.

Again, this may take a few minutes... let’s wait patiently...

When the installation is finished, the installer will tell you so. The final button to press will be labeled “Finish”. Once this button is clicked, the Firefox software has been installed on the computer.

Notepad and Text Files

You can open up Notepad by navigating through Start Menu ⇒ Accessories ⇒ Notepad.

Once Notepad is open, we can use it to create test files by simply typing text and saving it to a file.

Let’s type some HTML text that makes a very simple web page.

Click on File ⇒ Save As

In the Save In selection, choose Desktop. Then, in the File Name field, type in test.html. We name the file with the html extension to indicate to the Operating System (Windows) that it is a text file that contains HTML text. Finally, click on “Save”. You’ve now created a text file.

To view what the web page would look like after a web-browser rendered it, launch Firefox and choose File ⇒ Open File.

In the “Look in” selection list, choose the Desktop. Then find the text/html file we created earlier. Click once on the file and once on “Open”, or Double-click on it.

The web page will look something like this.

Your browser will allow you to view the “source” (the HTML text in raw form) of a page by clicking on View ⇒ Page Source.

A window will pop up with all the HTML text like so.

Email

There are many email clients that exist and are out there for download. One good email client is Mozilla Thunderbird. You can download it (from http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/) and install it, and setup your email account in it. You will need some information from the provider of your email account before you can successfully setup your account in Thunderbird.

As with web pages, you can also view the source of an email by clicking on View ⇒ Message Source.

A window should pop up with the source of that email. Viewing the source of an email using a web-based email client such as Hotmail or Gmail is also possible: it’s just a matter of finding the right options.

Files Files are independent collections of data that are stored permanently on your computer. Each file is an instance of a piece of data (ultimately stored as a sequence of 1s and 0s).

Windows allows you to manipulate files using a program called Windows Explorer. You can start it by clicking on Start Menu ⇒ Accessories ⇒ Windows Explorer.

Click on one of your local drives on the left (for example, C: or D:). Your hard drives hold collections of files and directories. Directories also hold more files and directories. To create a directory (AKA a “folder”) in it, right-click on any of the white space in the right area and choose “New Folder”.

Let’s call the new directory “test”. Now you can double-click on it to get into it. Since this directory is on the D: drive and not contained in any other directory, it is known as D:\test. All the files in that directory would be referred to as D:\test\, ie. they are prefixed by the directory they are in. If another directory (say, called “Marc”) was made in the directory that we just made, it is called a subdirectory and would be referred to as D:\test\Marc.

We can find the file we created before and copy it to our new location. Click on Desktop in the left part of Windows Explorer. Then find the file test.html on the right side. Rightclick on it, and choose “Copy” from the pop-up menu.

On the left, find the directory that we just created; it should be under D: (or C: if you don’t have a second drive)– if it is not, press F5 to refresh the structure. Then, on the left, right-click on the white space and choose “Paste” from the pop-up menu.

Running commands Commands are executable files that can be run. When these files are run, the computer executes all the instructions contained within them, one after the other.

To run commands easily, you must first open up the command-line interface or the shell. In Windows, this is called the MS-DOS prompt. Click on the Start Menu ⇒ Run.

Type in cmd and press Enter.

If that did not work, try typing command and press Enter.

The shell will look like a little black space. You can type commands in here.

The cd command is used to change directories. The dir command is to show all the files and directories that are in the current directory.

You can use the type command to show the contents of a text file.

Assuming you are connected to the Internet somehow, you can use the ipconfig (ifconfig in Linux) command to see what your IP address is. You can also use telnet to connect to to remote TCP servers if you know the port the service runs on (for example, 80 for HTTP).

You can use the ping and tracert (in Linux, this is traceroute) commands to measure the connectivity, statistics, and other properties of your network and the Internet.