When you go online or look at ads for electronics stores, you will probably be able to find a computer that will be just right for you. There are many types and styles available on the market. You can find a computer that will take up a whole room in your house, while you can also find a computer that will fit into the palm of your hand! At a business, you will probably find a mainframe computer. In your workplace or at home you will normally find a desktop computer. In the airport, the person sitting next to you could be working on a laptop computer or handheld computer. So, when you find yourself looking for a computer for your own personal use, you know you will have a lot to choose from. Read the rest of this entry »
Archive for the ‘Operating System’ Category
The Windows experience occurs mainly in its Taskbar – especially in the Start menu and System Tray. Vista gave the Start menu a welcome redesign; in Windows 7, the Taskbar and the System Tray get a thorough makeover.
The new Taskbar replaces the old small icons and text labels for running apps with larger, unlabeled icons. If you can keep the icons straight, the new design painlessly reduces Taskbar clutter. If you don’t like it, you can shrink the icons and/or bring the labels back.
In the past, you could get one-click access to programs by dragging their icons to the Quick Launch toolbar. Windows 7 eliminates Quick Launch and folds its capabilities into the Taskbar. Drag an app’s icon from the Start menu or desktop to the Taskbar, and Windows will pin it there, so you can launch the program without rummaging around in the Start menu. You can also organise icons in the Taskbar by moving them to new positions.
To indicate that a particular application on the Taskbar is running, Windows draws a subtle box around its icon – so subtle, in fact, that figuring out whether the app is running can take a moment, especially if its icon sits between two icons for running apps.
In Windows Vista, hovering the mouse pointer over an application’s Taskbar icon produces a thumbnail window view known as a Live Preview. But when you have multiple windows open, you see only one preview at a time. Windows 7′s version of this feature is slicker and more efficient. Hover the pointer on an icon, and thumbnails of the app’s windows glide into position above the Taskbar, so you can quickly find the one you’re looking for. (The process would be even simpler if the thumbnails were larger and easier to decipher.)
Also new in Windows 7′s Taskbar is a feature called Jump Lists. These menus resemble the context-sensitive ones you get when you right-click within various Windows applications, except that you don’t have to be inside an app to use them. Internet Explorer 8′s Jump List, for example, lets you open the browser and load a fresh tab, initiate an InPrivate stealth browsing session, or go directly to any of eight frequently visited web pages. Non-Microsoft apps can offer Jump Lists, too, if their developers follow the guidelines for creating them.
Tags: microsoft, os review, Windows 7
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The definition of an Operating System is the software that controls the operation of a computer, directs the input and output of data, keeps track of files, and controls the processing of computer programs (Britannica, 2008). Each new computer brought home from the store already has an operating system installed and ready to use, but it wasn’t always this way.
When Personal Home Computers (PCs) were first introduced in the early 1980s, they didn’t have an operating system; most didn’t even have a hard drive! These early PCs needed a floppy disk with stored drivers n order to get the operating system started. You then had to remove the operating system driver and insert a new floppy that contained the program you needed to work with. This second floppy would not only contain the individual program (word processor, spreadsheet, etc) but all the drivers needed to communicate with the PC as well. This time consuming and frustrating process of switching from floppy to floppy gave birth to the integrated operating system.
An operating system performs many functions; it keeps track of where things are stored on the hard drive, manages each components activity, and allows users to interact with the system by either typing commands on a keyboard or by using a Graphical User Interface (GUI, commonly pronounced gooey).
The most important function of an operating system, however, is translating the commands issued via keyboard or mouse into binary code; the language of computers represented by zeros and ones.
Because the operating system is now integrated directly onto a computer’s hard drive, the floppy disk has gone the way of the horse whip and become obsolete. Programs, along with the drivers and other necessary components, are stored directly onto the computer and available whenever the program is accessed.
Although there are many operating system’s available today Windows Vista, Mac OS X, Zeta, IBM, Unix, and Linux to name a few; Apple was one of the first to use an operating system in their Macintosh computer. This established a user-hardware relationship with a user-friendly interface and helped pave the way for future operating systems.
Caution must be taken when attempting to upgrade an existing operating system and a check for the necessary hardware is advisable. For example: if your computer had Windows 98 installed and you are attempting to upgrade to Windows XP, you would also need to install extra hardware components that were unavailable when Windows 98 was introduced. The new operating system will search for hardware that is unavailable and fail, thus making it impossible for your computer to function.
One other word of advice is to be sure to install an operating system that is compatible with your current system. For example: the hardware of a Macintosh is very different from that of a Windows computer and it is impossible for a Windows operating system to work on a Macintosh!
Operating systems have advanced tremendously in the last 25 plus years and will continue to improve. They have integrated themselves into everything from game consoles to PDAs and not all the uses have been discovered. It is very important to keep in mind the exact type of hardware and system being used so upgrades will be easier but the outdated use of floppys is (thank goodness) a thing of the past.
Tags: apple, GUI, microsoft, Operating System, OS
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