 Welcome to Microsoft Vista. My name is Sandra Butekis, and I'll be here to take you through a tour of all the great features that we have. Now, I've been working with Microsoft since DOS came out way, way long time ago, and I've been watching all the different versions of Windows, and I'll tell you, this is one of the best ones I've seen yet. I have a systems engineer in three different versions, and I've been training the Microsoft technologies for approximately 18 years. And I'll tell you, we're gonna have a lot of fun looking at some of the features in this course. This will be our overview chapter. Now, when I say overview, what that means is we will, of course, learn how to navigate around the interface, how to find our documents, how to start our documents, how to start programs, and really a lot of other great features just to get you used to the basic Windows interface that we have with Vista. Now, in subsequent chapters, you might see a little bit of repetitive information very similar to documents. Here, I'll talk about how to find a document and open a document, but I will take that information a little bit further in different chapters. So again, this one, let's get used to Vista, let's get used to some of the new features and views and navigation techniques, and then we'll move on to other topics in subsequent chapters. So, one of the first things that I would like to talk about is the new interface. Now, there's a couple funky things about the interface itself, and it really has to do with your computer, not with the software or the operating system, but the physical computer itself. Now, the new interface, which we call Vista Arrow, is this glass-looking, transparent window, lots of great effects type operating system, but if you've just upgraded an older machine or you have an onboard video card that just came with the system, it's nothing new, it's nothing spiffy, it just did perfect for Microsoft Word, you won't be able to see these effects. The good news is Vista can tell by your hardware, it actually has a rating system on whether or not it should show you these features, and if your video card and other components of the computer aren't capable of displaying and rendering them, then Vista just won't give them to you. So, in this slide right here, we have the new interface as advertised. It's kind of a transparent look. In fact, if you look at some of the windows on this slide, they're transparent on the title bar, so you can see essentially a fuzzy, blurred out version of what's behind it. Now, this is effective course from the new video card that could be installed on the computer. Now, again, this video card, let's talk about it a little bit because I don't want anyone disappointed when your screens don't look like our screens. The card has to be an aftermarket card, and video is one of the top models that a lot of people pick, but it certainly doesn't mean that's a card you need. What that video card needs to be capable of is something called DirectX9C, 32-bit color settings. It's got to have 64 megs of memory on the card itself, and your computer has to have a minimum of 512 megs of RAM. Now, again, these are some technical specs, and for those of you who are home users and maybe aren't used to dealing with hardware, if it's a brand new machine that came with Vista, chances are pretty good you'll have everything you want. And hopefully, if it's a machine you're upgrading, someone will take the time to either upgrade the components necessary or at least explain. Now, if you don't have the updated video cards, that's okay. I can say truly, I'm running Vista in all of my offices, and in each one of them I would say it's probably 50% has the right card and 50% doesn't. What that means for people with an onboard card or a generic card is your interface is going to look very similar to this. Now, what you're going to see is instead of a transparent look on the title bar, it's more a solid slate color. You can't see behind it. Now, it's available with a standard video card, and it's also an option that you can choose if by chance you don't like all the transparent effects. Like any other version of Windows, there's a lot of components that we can essentially customize when it comes to screen colors, et cetera. Now, when you're starting up Vista, we have a lot of great options. Now, the problem with some of the computers these days and a lot of the power save modes is people don't always know if their computer's on or if it's off, and it sounds kind of silly, but a lot of computers that are off will have a yellow light, and a lot of computers that are in sleep mode will have a yellow light. So really, what you want to do to start up this program or this operating system on the computer is first you move the mouse, press any key on the keyboard to essentially wake it up. Now, if it doesn't wake up, that just might mean it's in a power save mode or maybe power save shut the machine down into a sleep mode. So at this point, most times you want to just power up the PC itself, which just means pushing the on button. Now, as Vista comes up, you will see all the user accounts or maybe just one user account, depending on how your machine is configured. All you need to do is to click your name to get started and it will load the desktop that belongs to your account. Now, we do have something called locked, so that if I walk away from the computer, I can lock it so someone can't necessarily see the work that I'm working on. And again, locked is no different than logging on. All you need to do is click your name and enter a password if that's what you have assigned to your user account. Now, that brings us to our next subject, leaving your computer. Now, this could be leaving your computer for the day because you're going home from work. It could be for five minutes or to go get lunch or just to walk down the hall. But what you can think about is whether or not you want what you're working to be available to people who are walking by or who may sit at your desk. So we have a few different options. One of the first options we have is something called switch user. Maybe someone just needs to use your computer for a few moments and you don't want them to essentially work on your screens. So you'll see in the menus, in this graphic, we have an option called switch user. And all it really does is locks your account, it keeps everything running and allows another user to log on and essentially start their own session. Now that is different than log off. If I choose log off as a user, it's actually gonna close all the programs that I'm running, shut everything down and then bring me back to a login screen. Now we have lock. Lock is very similar to switch user. Switch user of course allows someone else to start or resume a session. And all lock does is it keeps your programs running, any documents you're working on, really the screen as you left it and it puts the login screen right up. So unless they know your password they can't access the stuff that you have open and running. Now lock is kind of a unique feature because with lock, there's a lot of different ways of doing it. Now some of us know control all delete was our task manager and we could hit enter to lock the computer. So for those of you who've been around for a while that still may work for you, depending on how you've set things up of course. We have it right here in the menu system. We have a button right around the start menu that looks like a lock. And probably my favorite is most keyboards these days do have a window button or a window key and it's down near your space bar. And if you press the window key and hit L for lock from the keyboard it'll actually lock it for you in a very quick keyboard shortcut. You get to pick your favorite method. Now some of the other items you can think about when leaving your computer is you can do a fresh restart. Now a fresh restart is good if some programs have been acting up and maybe you're leaving for the day and you'd like to leave your computer on at night for things like Windows update. You can just do a restart which will log you off, clear all the programs and kind of get your computer ready for tomorrow. It certainly won't log you in without you clicking on your name. We also have something called sleep. Now sleep mode takes everything you're working with and essentially takes a snapshot and saves it. And then it shuts down into the computer to a very low power state. So tomorrow or in an hour or whenever you come back to your computer and you essentially hit a button it'll wake up the computer and bring you right back to where it was when you left it. In terms of starting programs we can do this in a number of different ways. Now we always have the start menu. So when you click on start one of the first things you'll see is all programs and we have a very unique system here with Vista where instead of basically showing you menus from left to right and making them take up your whole screen you have one vertical menu which as you click on links essentially replaces the menu you're working on. And I'll show you that in a little bit during a demo. So you can click on start. Something else if you're a keyboard shortcut is you can press the Windows key and the Windows key will have the same effect. It'll bring up your menus so that you can choose a program. Now if you like Windows Explorer and you're already exploring through my documents and the contents of the C drive if you see a file you need to open or program you want to start you can always double click there. Something else you can do with Windows is let's say I don't have any programs running but I'm looking at documents and I see that PowerPoint presentation that I need to work on. I don't have to back out and go open up PowerPoint and then go try to find my file. I can double click on the file as I see it and it will start the program for me. And of course last but not least we now have something called Auto Run. Now Auto Run is when a DVD or a CD is built with a program that automatically starts when you put that in the drive. Now this is a touchy subject to talk about in terms of will it happen on your computer or not because it's an option that you can pick. By default Auto Run program should run and you'll see a little pop-up menu that says this program is trying to start and you can allow it. Now that Auto Run really depends on what type of disk is in there. If you've put in the new disk for Office 2007 Auto Run will be a setup program to help you install a program. If you put in a disk for your brand new printer again it'll be some form of a startup program. But it might be music or it might be a DVD with picture files so that Auto Run might actually bring you into a slideshow or into a Windows media player or into iTunes. So what happens it really depends on what type of disk and what kind of options you've set on this machine. Again by default it should just pop up on the screen and give you some options. Now in terms of finding documents and files there's a whole bunch of ways to find the stuff that you've been working on and this I think is really one of my favorite parts of Vista. I happen to like the keyboard. I type everything. I like all the keyboard shortcuts. I'm very organized when it comes to what goes where but in terms of starting something I just want to access it very fast. So you can always go to the start button, click on the documents folder, that works. But what I like is you can click on start and you have this bar called search. And if you know the name of the file, the program or the shortcut really, anything that you want to start you can type it in right there. So let's say I have 10 PowerPoint presentations for Vista. If I go to search and I start typing in Vista what happens is anything with Vista in the name essentially goes to the top of that menu bar. So I can type in the name of a file and the file just comes up. So it's a very handy shortcut for those of you who like to work that way. Now again in terms of finding the documents and files let's say you don't know the name, you're not lucky you can't type in Vista cause you thought you named it Vista and it's not coming up. Then all you need to do once you type it and it has no search results when you hit enter you do get a search results screen. And that'll actually bring you into something called advanced search results. I will show you this closer in a demonstration because in the advanced search results anything you know about the file will be helpful. Whether it be date or attributes or program and again we'll show you that fairly shortly so that you can see all the different choices. And of course once you finally find that file no matter how you found it all you need to do is double click or click once and press enter and that file will open for you. Now when you're switching between programs we have a couple of different options and even before I go into the options let me back up a few steps for those of you who are a little newer and when you're running Windows Vista or really any Windows based operating system you can have more than one program running at the same time. Each program can have different windows. You might have five word documents. You might have a solitaire game going. You might have a chat session with your mother going. Regardless of what's going on each program or most documents depending on the program do open up in different windows. So when I say switching between programs and windows really I mean switching between all the things that you might have going at any particular time. Now again you'll hear this a few times how this works is different depending on the video card and the hardware requirements that your computer has met. So if you're running the Vista Aero Experience you're going to see it one way and if you're running just regular Vista without the transparency and the glass effects you're certainly going to see some different screens. Now the Olibu Goody Alt tab works which just means I hold on the alt key and I can press the tab key and every time I hit tab it's going to bring me to the next program or window in line. So that's a nice way to essentially flip through. We also have a switch programs button. Now if you're running Aero and the glass type effects you're going to see exactly what's on this slide right here where they all essentially cascade. If you have a mouse that has a scroll wheel you can actually scroll through all of these and it'll just keep rotating. What's nice is these aren't even images. If you happen to be viewing a video let's say that video is going to be running in one of these videos in one of these windows and all you have to do is scroll through and bring forward whichever one you want and then click to select it. Now again if you don't have the Aero Experience it's going to look pretty similar to the alt tab screen where you click on the button and it just gives you a bar that almost looks like a toolbar and it'll list all the programs and windows that you can pick from and of course you can click on which one you want. So no matter which way your computer is set up or which hardware you have you certainly have some nice capabilities on how to move from that one screen to the next. Now when you're working with Vista as with any windows product you also have a lot of customization. One of the first things I'll talk about is the mouse. Now mouse you can find in control panel and that allows you to essentially pick which buttons you want to use what your pointers are going to look like the double click speed. This is actually pretty important because if you are new to using windows in a mouse then you can essentially slow things down or speed them up and really find your comfort level so that you can work comfortably and easily with all of the windows in the mouse that you have to operate. Also of course with the buttons the standard Windows based operating system does use left and right buttons or primary secondary buttons. And what that means is if you're a lefty or a righty you might want to switch which one's your primary button because it would change depending on which hand you use to control the mouse. Now some of the other things about the mouse I just want to talk about there are a number of different terms that we use in windows. Point, hover, click, double click, right click, select, multiple select, they're all these terms. And really it's just telling you what to do with the mouse. To point to an object just means to take the pointer on the screen and move it over an object. You don't have to click at all because what happens is a lot of times you'll see some information display about the object or maybe shortcuts available, et cetera. So pointing all by itself actually will give you a lot of features. And really that kind of puts me back to the next one which is hover. So you point but then you kind of stay there. You don't move the mouse around, you hold it still. So whether you are administrator and you want to find out something about the network card you can just hover over the network card properties. If you're a user and you're just trying to find out information about a word document you created, same thing, well you'll get some different information that'll pop up for you. To click once is to select and to double click is really a shortcut. It usually means take this and open it or take this and close it. So think of it as a two step process that you're trying to do quickly. So if you double click on a file it selects it and opens it. And if you double click on one of the shortcut menus it might take that document and close it. So that's why double click is a shortcut. You're actually trying to do two steps at once. The right click usually has shortcut menus. And I say usually all the newer programs tend to use it but I can't promise every program. And what that shortcut menu does is it gives you a list of some of the most common options that someone might pick if they were to click on that particular object. An example if I right click on a document name within my documents folder. It might say open, print, preview, properties all the things I might do on a document before I open it. But if I highlight a word within the document because it's up and running then it might want spell check, cut, copy. So the features are gonna be entirely different. So the right click is in fact a shortcut menu and those shortcuts will change depending on what you're right clicking on. To select is to click and drag maybe to highlight text to change the font. And a multiple select just means that you're going to select more than one object. Maybe you wanna delete a handful of pictures cause they're old pictures or they're duplicates. And a multiple select allows you to hold down the control key and click on a number of different items all at once and then have them all highlighted so you can do something to them. Your shift key by the way is a common window shortcut. We can click on the first item in a list, hold down shift, click on the last item in the list and you'll be able to select the whole list. Just a couple shortcuts you can use with a mouse. Likewise, we have the keyboard. Now most of us don't think much about typing but there are some areas where maybe it's a disability, maybe you just like to type slower, maybe you have a keyboard that just operates different than the one you've been using. So what happens with a keyboard is you can also go into control panel and go to the keyboard and just adjust some simple things like the repeat rate or the delay before it'll repeat a letter. So if you're trying to do duplicate entries of a particular letter or something you're pressing on the keyboard. So that's good for you to know. What you'll hear most commonly however is a term called keyboard shortcuts. And what a keyboard shortcut is, is it's you pressing two or more keys consecutively. Control Alt Delete might be one that you've all heard of. You have a window L to lock out the screen. So there's a lot of different keyboard shortcuts and that's all they mean so you don't have to take your mouse and click here and click here and click here. Maybe one shortcut will do it for you. On your keyboard you have arrow keys. So if you just want to move up and down within a document or around on the screen, you can use those. Again, it's document specific or program specific. Your tab key will move you around a dialogue box but it'll also put a space in a document. So all these different keys have different functions. Again, it depends on which programs you're running. Now if you want to highlight from the keyboard you can actually hold down your shift key when in the middle of text and you can hit your arrow keys and that'll highlight as you tap. Here I just want to show you a little clearer view of shortcut menus. And again, which menu pops down depends on what you right click on. Now here we have right clicked in an open space down around a documents folder or browsing the drives on the computer or different folders that we have and you'll see we have some options. One of them might be new so you can create a new folder, a new document, a new et cetera. If I was to right click on something else that menu would be entirely different. So here I just wanted to show you a closer look and whichever command you pick is fine. It can be either left or right mouse button. Now with help and support they've done a really nice job. In help and support we have all of our different topics and if you take time to learn a little more about your computer in Vista through these menus I don't think you'll be very disappointed. They have information in Vista like help with hardware and help with software and it really goes into not just how to use Vista but how to use the computer and all the different computer terms. So it's definitely worth taking a little visit to. Shortly I'll demonstrate some of the help and support features and we'll travel down a couple of those paths just to see what's available for knowledge. Now how you access help and support is by clicking on start and of course choosing over to your right help and support. Help and support comes with topics so you can look at particular topics whether you're just starting or whether there's a particular issue like printing but you can also type in a question that you have and it will query everything within help and support and it will come back with some possible answers. Once it comes back with answers they're all links so you just have to click on the link for the topic of interest that you think might answer your question. Now just like a browser there is a back button so you can go back to the last place you were in the event that's not the topic that you need and also with help you can essentially print out all of these topics. So if you want to take it for a little bit of leisure time reading it makes it very easy for you to print these out on your printer.