A simple guide to computing

by Chris Woodford. Last updated: August 9, 2011.

If you've got this far, you must know how to use a computer! But if you're helping a friend, relative, or parent to get to grips with the strange world of computers, the Internet, and the World Wide Web, you might find the many books on the subject are too lengthy or too generic for their needs. Faced with this problem recently, I decided to write my own quick guide. It tells you how to switch the machine on and off and do basic tasks like browsing the Web. It's all a novice needs to know to get started!

Photo: Our gateway to the world: the World Wide Web (WWW).

About your computer

This is a quick and easy-to-follow guide to using a new computer for browsing the Internet, written for computer novices (and seniors in particular).

Why doesn't it explain everything in the manual?

Your computer isn't like a washing machine, a TV, or a DVD player. Appliances like this do one, specific thing so they're relatively easy to use—and just as easy to explain.

A computer is a general-purpose machine that can do all kinds of different things; the manufacturer can never know exactly how you're going to use it, so your computer doesn't come with the same kind of easy-to-follow instructions.

Hardware, software... and Windows

Your computer is a piece of hardware: a physical, electronic machine.

When you switch on your computer, it starts a general-purpose program or piece of software called Microsoft Windows Vista (often called "Windows" or "Vista" for short).

You can use Windows Vista to run other programs that do specific jobs, like sending emails, looking at websites, viewing pictures on a digital camera, and so on.

Windows updates

Windows keeps itself up to date automatically when your computer is connected to the Internet. Occasionally, you'll see messages about "Windows updates". Most of the messages are for information only.

1: Switching on

You switch your computer on and off in different ways.

Switching on is easy.

Plug in the power cable and the mouse.

Open the laptop lid, push the power button briefly, and wait for the screen to light up.

After you switch on, your computer has to set up a series of different things in a particular sequence. This can take a minute or two. You'll see several different messages on the screen in turn. You don't have to do anything else while this is happening—just wait.

First, you see the computer maker's start-up message. With a Toshiba laptop, for example, you see this:

Then you see the Microsoft start-up screen:

Then you see the Microsoft Windows Vista start-up screen:

You'll hear a brief snatch of "start-up music".

Finally, you see what's called the Windows desktop. Once you see this, the computer is ready for you to use:

2: Switching off

Switching off is completely different.

Your computer has to switch off in a more orderly way, finishing all the jobs it's doing before you turn off the power. There are two ways to switch off.

The easy way to switch off

If you have a laptop, the simplest way to switch off properly is to close the lid completely. The computer will take a minute or two to finish what it's doing and close everything down properly, so leave it on the table for a few minutes before packing it away.

Another way to switch off

You can also switch off without closing the lid by using your mouse. This is the best way to switch off if you're using a desktop machine.

1. Move the mouse to the START button (the blue circle with its multicolored square) in the lower left corner of the desktop:

2. Click the mouse on the button. A window appears on the left side of the desktop:

3. Move the mouse over the arrow in the bottom right corner of this window. The arrow turns blue:

4. A list of options appears. Click on the bottom one, shutdown, and your computer switches off.  You see the Windows shutdown message as it does so:

5. When the screen goes black and the computer stops making any noise, it's safe to pack away (if it's a laptop) or leave alone (if it's a desktop).

More ways to close down

There are other ways of shutting your computer down when you've finished using it, known as "sleep" and "hibernate". They remember what you're doing and put your computer in a "semi-shutdown" state so it stars up more quickly the next time you want to use it. You can learn about those later; for now, while you're still mastering your machine, it's best to shut down your computer completely each time you use it.

3: Understanding the desktop

The colored background picture on your computer screen is called the desktop: it works as a kind of table top onto which you can put things you're working on or use most often.

The small pictures that appear on the desktop are called icons. Each one represents a different thing (for example, a document or a program you can run) you can look at or do.

Your computer is set up with only a few icons on the desktop to start with, but you can add more later.

The desktop

A typical desktop has lots of icons on it. You can have as many icons on the desktop as you wish. The icons are also called "shortcuts": quick ways to look at or do something:

The taskbar

The gray bar along the bottom is called the Windows taskbar. It shows you the names of programs you're running, files you're looking at, or other things you're doing in small rectangular boxes.

The status area

The little pictures in the extreme right corner show you, at a glance, different things that are happening with your computer while you're using it. For example, one of them shows you how much battery power you have left, while another tells you whether your Internet connection is working normally:

These pictures work a bit like the display behind a car's steering wheel. Sometimes things flash, flicker, and change appearance. Don't worry. You can safely ignore what's going on here (at least, for the time being).

4: Using Windows

If you click on an icon, a small rectangle opens up with more details. These rectangles are called windows. You can have lots of them open on the desktop at once, all representing different things or doing different jobs—a bit like having lots of pieces of paper piled up on a desktop.

Moving windows to the top

You'll notice that as you open up one window, you will cover up other windows underneath. You can see what's in any other, partially covered-up window at any time by clicking a part of it that you can still see. The window you click on will then move to the front and the window that was previously on top will disappear behind it.

Closing windows

You can close windows to stop your desktop cluttering up.

You do this by moving your mouse to the small red cross in the top right corner of the window you want to close and clicking on it:

You don't have to close the windows you open, but you may find it confusing after a time if you have too many open at once.

Scrolling windows

Sometimes windows contain more information than you can see at first glance.

Suppose a window contains a long email (electronic letter) from someone or a lengthy Web page. If you read the email and find yourself at the bottom of the window, you can continue reading on by scrolling the text. Scrolling means moving the entire contents of the window up or down so you can read what's above or below the bit you can see.

If a window has a gray box on the right side of it, with a small gray square inside, it means there's more information inside the window than you can see at the moment. You can see the rest of the information by scrolling up or down.

You can do this in several different ways:

1. Scrolling up or down a page

To scroll down, click the mouse once in the vertical bar on the right of a window just below the gray square.

To scroll up, click once in the vertical bar just above the gray square:

2. Scrolling more quickly

Click on the small gray square in the vertical bar on the right of the window. Hold the mouse button down. Drag the mouse down (keeping your finger pressed on the button the whole time) and you will see the text in the window moves down. Drag the gray square upward to move the text the other way.

3. Scrolling with the keyboard

Press the "Page Down" key (on the right of the keyboard, and sometimes marked PgDn). To move up a page, press the "Page Up" key (above the Page Down key, sometimes marked PgUp).

You can also use the arrow keys on the bottom right of the keyboard (⇑⇓) to scroll up or down one line at a time.

5: Understanding the Internet

The Internet, the Web, and email are easy to confuse:

• The Internet is a global network of computers informally linked together by telephone lines and other connections.
• The World Wide Web (usually shortened to "the Web" or WWW) is a kind of limitless library of information you can access from a computer using the Internet. Websites are parts of the World Wide Web you can "visit" from your computer.
• Email is a way of sending typed messages to someone else's computer. The messages travel back and forth over the Internet.

6: Understanding websites

Websites are a bit like magazines or catalogs you read on your computer screen. Each website is operated by a different person, company, or organization from their computer. When you look at something like "the BBC website", you're actually using your computer to show information stored on the BBC computer. The information travels back and forth over the Internet, often traveling from the opposite side of the world. That's why websites can occasionally take time to appear on your computer. Unlike magazines and catalogs, websites can be updated instantly and very frequently so they are often (but not always very up-to-date). Websites that show news, for example, are updated constantly, all day long (unlike paper newspapers, which are "updated" only once a day).

Looking at a website is called browsing and you use a computer program called a web browser to do it. This is what a typical website looks like when you use a web browser to view it. It's the BBC News website from the UK:

Web pages

Each distinct part of a website is called a web page. The first and most important part of a website is called the home page—and it's a bit like the front page of a newspaper: it tells you what you can find in the rest of the website. The other pages generally cover separate topics. For example, on the BBC Website there are separate pages for BBC Television, Radio 2, Radio 3, and so on.

Some websites have just one page (which can be any length); others (like the BBC) have thousands of pages.

Links

Each page has highlighted phrases (often, but not always, printed in blue and sometimes underlined as well). These are called links.

If you click on a link, your web browser loads another web page giving more information. For example, if you're on the home page of the BBC News website, there is a highlighted link Weather. If you click on this, your web browser will show you the BBC Weather web page. The words on the extreme left of the BBC News web page are colored blue. Each one is a link to a page giving more detailed information about that topic. For example, if you click on Politics, you'll get a more detailed page about political news stories.

If you click on a link, you'll either see another page on the same website or a page on a completely different website—and it's not always immediately clear which. As you use the Web, you can hop from one website to another very quickly and you need to keep your wits about you to know where you are.

7: Looking at websites

Before you can look at websites, you have to start your Web browser—the program you use to look at the Web.

Starting your web browser

On the Windows desktop, click your mouse on the Web browser icon:

It takes a few seconds for your web browser to start up.

When it's ready for you to use, you see a mostly white window open on the main desktop, like this, with the word Google in multicolored letters (if not, ask a friend to set your machine up so it works this way):

Once your web browser is open, you can use it in two different ways:

• To look at a specific website (if you know where to find it).
• To search for a website.(if you don't know where to find it).

9: Looking at a specific website

Sometimes you want to find information about a specific organization, company, or person by looking at their website.

Each website has a particular "address" (sometimes called a URL) on the World Wide Web, often (but not always) written in a form like this:

• www.google.com: Google web search engine
• www.wikipedia.org: Wikipedia online encyclopedia
• www.bbc.co.uk: BBC
• www.whitehouse.gov: US President's website

Most (but not all) website addresses start with the letters www.

Looking up a website if you know the address

A website address is a bit like a phone number or the address of a house: you can use it to make direct contact with something or someone you're interested in.

If you know a website address, you can go straight to that website by typing the address into the long, rectangular address bar at the top of your web browser. You have to press ENTER after you've typed the address so the computer knows when you're finished:

Sometimes it takes time for a web page to "load" (display completely) while information travels back and forth over the Internet. At busy times, you might have to wait a minute or more for pages to load fully, but you can usually still read and scroll pages even while they're loading.

10: Searching for information on the Web

It's a pretty safe assumption that there's information about every topic you can possibly imagine somewhere on the World Wide Web, but it's not always obvious where to find it.

Suppose you want to know something about the artist Rubens. Rubens died long before the Internet was invented, so he obviously never set up a website about himself (unlike many contemporary artists). But it's quite likely Rubens enthusiasts, art scholars, museums, and others have set up web pages about him.

Search engines

You can find information on the Web by searching with a special kind of website called a search engine. A search engine is an index of billions of other websites. To find something on the Web, you type a list of keywords into the search engine. The search engine scans its index and shows you a list of the websites most likely to contain what you're looking for.

Google

Most people use a search engine website called Google—so much so, in fact, that searching for information on the Web is often now referring to as "googling". When people talk about "googling for" something, they mean searching the Web.

You can search for information about any topic using the Google website (at the address www.google.com). To save time, your web browser is set up so it goes to Google automatically whenever you use it for the first time:

How to use Google

1. Move your mouse so the cursor is in the box in the middle of the screen.

2. Click the left mouse button.

3. Type a few keywords (usually no more than about half a dozen) summarizing what you're looking for into the box. To find out about Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, you could type:

4. When you've finished typing, click your mouse on the gray button where it says Google search.

Exploring search results

When you type search words into Google, you'll search a long list of "hits" (results). This is a list of websites with information about the topic you're search for. Google tries to arrange them in order, with the most useful and most popular sites first.

Click on the blue underlined phrases to visit any of the websites that interest you. You'll see that your web browser loads the new website when you do so.

If, when you reach the new website, you decide it's not what you want, you can go back to Google to explore a different website by pressing the back button in your web browser. Put your cursor on the backward arrow and click to return to the web page you last looked at.

More about searching

The words you type into a search engine are sometimes called search terms. If you choose your search terms carefully, you're more likely to find what you want.

Type this…	…to find this
Rubens	Paul Rubens
Rubens artist pictures	Examples of pictures by Rubens
Thanksgiving date 2008	When does thanksgiving fall in 2008?
Gordon Brown prime minster	Information about Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Gordon Brown estate agent	Information about Gordon Brown Associates estate agents.

Searching problems

One difficulty with searching the Web is the sheer volume of information available. Even for the simplest search, Google can return millions of results.

If you use too few search keywords or make them too general, you'll find Google returns far more hits—and some that are irrelevant. For example, if you type in "Blair" as a Google search term, you'll get information about Tony Blair, Lionel Blair, Ian Blair, the Blair Witch Project, Blair Castle, and all kinds of other "blairs" as well. It helps to be specific. If you're looking for information about Blair Castle, type Blair castle into Google.

Exact searches

If you type the keywords blue peter into Google, you'll find all kinds of Web pages that contain either the word blue, the word peter, or both. You'll find pages about a singer called Peter Blue as well as ones about the TV program Blue Peter. If you're searching for information about the Blue Peter program, that's a nuisance.

You can narrow your search by putting double quotes around the words you type into Google. If you search for "Peter Blue" (putting quotes around your search terms), you'll find more pages about Peter Blue and fewer about Blue Peter.

9: Lost or confused?

As you hop from one website to another by following links, it's quite easy to lose your place or forget what you were originally trying to do. If you get lost or stuck, there are four easy solutions:

1: Go backwards

Press the back button in your web browser. Put your cursor on the backward arrow and click to return to the web page you last looked at. You can keep doing this as many times as you need to step back through all the pages you've visited.

2: Go back to Google

You can type www.google.com into the address bar of your web browser, then press ENTER, to start again from Google.

3: Close your Web browser and start again from scratch

Click on the cross in the top right corner of your Web browser to close it completely.

You can then start again by clicking on the Web browser icon on your desktop (see starting your web browser up above).

4: Switch off

If all else fails, you can always switch off your computer. Remember to switch off by closing the lid (or clicking the mouse on the start button, as explained in switching off up above).

It's much better to use one of the other three methods rather than switching your computer on and off all the time.