getting e-smart - I

continuing from : getting e-smart – introduction

i promised you guys that i will discuss email in details in this post, i am keeping it on hold as virat gave me few valuable suggestions about this series. so i have decided to start from the scratch. please keep in mind that this is an easy to understand explainable series. so don’t bet with someone over any statement made by me in it. i wouldn’t not give you rock-solid-definitions during your reading of this series. you can always find the definitions on internet.

i don’t intend to spoon feed you as well past first half a dozen posts. the basic idea behind all this is to make a newbie understand the computer and internet and learn thoroughly to search on internet using a search engine with effective and practical use of key-words. as you know i can’t do it alone you also have to respond to it. so leave comments if you any question in any post or send me an email or ping me over instant messengers or over phone.

i have been asked by a couple of people “how to leave comments?” it’s pretty easy. below every post you will find a small window ” leave a reply”. in the same window, enter your name and your email address (i hope you got one by now and preferably it’s a gmail account). leave the website option blank and write your message or question. i will reply back to it at the same place at the earliest. always give a valid email address, though you can write a fake name if you wish to.

let’s begin;

a computer is a device which is made to ease down human life so learning it should be fun, i will try to keep it fun. there always are few requisites before your learn anything. in this case i ask for none except that you understand english and pardon me for my grammatical mistakes. please always grab “what i mean to tell you” not “what exactly i write”

first thing i want you to understand a fact that it’s not easy to mess up a computer physically, so don’t worry. when the personal computer was designed the designer took care of the fact that it would be used by people who might not know anything. so they kept very good color-schema for computer peripherals connections while the naming conventions might suck in the beginning but it too is logical.

in short, when you connect any things to a computer you will realize that the one color port could be connected to the same particular color’s extension. monitor plug is blue and it goes to the blue port on computer, likewise. same applies to the part of shapes and designs. if it’s a three pin socket you surely can’t connect a four pic cable to it and if you have two ports with 36 pins each watch carefully these pins would be in different sequence. don’t believe it? check it yourself.

i hope most of you would be using one of window’s operating system : xp, vista or 7. so most of my discussion would be around them only. if you wanna know to how to find which operating system you use. do exactly as i say, press and hold the windows key(the one which has a flag symbol on it, it’s made of four little squares) on your keyboard and than press “pause/break” key (you can find it in the right top corner of your keyboard.

a window will appear and you can check the major details about your computer there. just check it once, if you don’t understand anything, don’t break your head over it; we will cover it soon. now tell me honestly, did you struggle to locate the keys? well you see, i can tell you a lot of shortcuts but you need to know which key is where. please download and use a typing-software.

well, let’s talk about some hardware (we will denote it as h/w from now on). computer h/w is a collection of very interesting and logical pieces, cpu, ups, dvd-reader/writer, monitor, key-board, mouse/mice, speaker, mike, web-cam etc. as of now, i am gonna talk about cpu only. rest peripherals are not of much relevance as of now.

cpu, got a lot inside; a power supply converter known as smps (switch mode power supply), a motherboard or logic-board, processor, ram (memory), hdd (hard-disk), cd/dvd-drive etc. for now, let’s concentrate on the outer portion of it. you got two main buttons on the front or top panel. they are the most important ones.

there would be a big and a small switch. as you might know as of now, the bigger one is to start the computer. now, the smaller one is for hard-reset, it means to re-start (turning off the on computer and start it again) the computer without the use of operating system. say, sometimes your system hanged and you are not able to do anything on it. and all means and tricks which i will tell you about don’t work; do a hard reset if you wanna use it again immediately. and if you just wanna shut it down. press and hold the big switch, it will shut down properly in a minute or so.

/*caution : use this trick only when, no other measure works. it’s meant to work only when nothing else works. as sometimes it could be real frustrating when your system refuses to shut down.*/

laptop owners : you can use the switch which you use to start it.

this post became bit lengthy than i wanted it to be, so i sign off for now. next time, i would be back with task-manager, start-panel and control-panel. ciao till than; please leave your feed-back and lemme know what do you wanna see & how could i improve it more for you.