 Hi there, my name is Ken Mayer and I'm going to be your instructor for this course on computing fundamentals. So in the last 30 years I've had the opportunity to work with a variety of different operating systems, some that aren't even around in today's world. Of course eventually we moved into the personal computer and working with something we call the disk operating system. Certainly worked from there through shell commands to install hardware, to install the software, even building some of these computers from scratch. I then continued to move and follow along with the different operating systems that came out. And now came this thing called Windows. And of course I followed the Windows family all the way through to the current Windows 8. I worked with other network operating systems such as Novell. And outside of the operating systems I've also worked in the arena of the networking infrastructure, working with some of the biggest vendors for the routing and switching markets, for the security and firewall markets. I also have a hand at doing a lot of audits to work with what we call security or sometimes ethical hacking. And so I hope that with this foundation over the last 30 years with all the things I'm still doing as a consultant, that I'll be able to share that information with you in a way that makes it very easy for you to understand how the computing fundamentals work and to be able to get you going in the world of computing. So in this module we're going to talk about the fundamentals of your operating systems. And so what we'll do is of course describe what an operating system is, how we can do some of the basic configurations of the operating systems, and then introduce what an application is and how that's different than an operating system. And then of course with all of that we're going to talk about how the hardware and the software, both the applications and operating systems are going to work together. And then we're going to look at some of the fundamental settings that you can use and control to make the operating system more convenient for you to make you more productive through the use of something like the control panel that you see in Windows. So let's start off by talking about what an operating system is. So what we'll do is we'll cover how applications and hardware work together with an operating system. I'm going to go back a little bit in history to let you know where we were and why having an operating system like Windows is so useful for us now. That means I'll also talk about some of the common operating system features. Get into the ability to cruise through your files and your folders through the directory infrastructure. I'll also talk about the needs to keep an operating system up-to-date through patches and other types of updates. So I want to talk first a little bit about the history, and you're going to hear me repeat this over a few times, just to make sure that we're clear about the importance of an operating system. In the old days, the operating system, well even today, is supposed to be a way of interacting between you the user and the hardware like maybe a printer that's connected to your computer. I like to make computers look like laptops. So basically you're interacting with the operating system that is in control of the functions of what the computer does. Part of that control means that it's operating and working with different peripherals. That's what we call different hardware devices that we attach to a computer. And it could be like a printer, or of course it could be like a mouse that we connect or the keyboards, even though I drew a laptop or a keyboard in there. So when we started this work, we needed to have a way to be able to physically implement commands. We wanted to be able to take our actions that we want the hardware to take to happen through the operating system, and the way we did it in the old days is we had what was called the disk operating system. Now the disk operating system, known as DOS, was designed to give us an interface, but it was through a series of commands that we actually had to type in here. I want to kind of reverse those. Let me make it look the right way. C, colon, and then the pounds are the greater than sign. And so if you didn't know the commands, you were forever searching, looking through reference guides. But the idea was that we wanted to be able to issue a command to have something happen. Like maybe we wanted to open up a certain program, so we had to know what we called the path of where the program is and understand some of these extensions that we used that kind of were coded into the commands to be able to make some program run or open up. And in those days, if a program did launch for us, it also was in a command line format that it often didn't have a beautiful graphical interface like we see in today's world. And the idea was that as we continued to issue different commands, maybe we wanted to look through the list of files that we have, so we had to memorize commands like dir for directory, and all the commands had to be eight letters or less. But it was our way of being able to interact with an operating system, and then that operating system could interact with the hardware. As an example, if I issued the directory command, it would actually have to go to the hard drive. We often draw them as little cylinders to be able to retrieve the list of files that were there, and then when that information came back to list them for us so we knew what contents we had stored. Now, that seemed to be in the day, one of the cool things to do with computers, to be able to know that you had commands that you could make things happen. Well, then came the idea and concept of Windows. Certainly, we could say, if any of you go back in history, that maybe Mac and Tosh or Apple, as we call them today, had some of the first Windows and not necessarily from Microsoft, but I'm not going to get into that age-old argument. The idea was is that we wanted to have a way to be able to take actions on an operating system that would basically translate anything we did by turning them into DOS commands without us having to memorize the commands. And so what would happen now is that we would maybe see an icon. That's what we call the little pictures that are on the screens of maybe a printer, and we knew that if we could move our mouse, a little pointing device over to that and click on it, that that would do the same thing as finding the proper DOS command to be able to actually print a document or a piece of paper. And so that made life a lot easier for us because basically those visual commands that you would do would translate into these DOS commands, and then you would be, of course, much more productive because you didn't have to research, memorize, or kind of, you know, struggle at trying to figure out how to get certain things done. The other thing that the operating system did for us is it gave us kind of an interface to the hardware. By an interface, what I meant is in the old days, if we had, let's say, a command line program. And remember, the command line really just didn't do much for us as far as being able to set up easy communications from one application to a piece of hardware. And so in the old days, we bought some sort of word processing program that we would launch through the command line. We had to find a way to be able to convert the data that we were typing in into something that a printer would be able to understand. And so that was the concept of a driver. The drivers were ways of translating what we saw on the screen. So even if we saw this, you know, list of word documents or, you know, typed document a letter, whatever you're creating, we had to find a way to translate that into something that each printer that we bought was capable of understanding. Some of the problems we had is that there were a variety of different printers. And so if you decided to suddenly buy a new printer because maybe the old one died, then we had problems using that same program with the new printer because it may have been by a different company or had a different set of instructions. And by the way, printers have their own operating systems, often called firmware, which are basically loaded into the chips of the printers that have all the instructions. And so we had to find a way to translate that. Drivers did that job for us. They helped us translate our output into something that the device, the hardware device that was connected to us would be able to understand. So one of the concepts that came out of Windows, and by the way, this also made it very expensive because if you wanted to use this word processing program, the people who created that program at that time were required to create drivers to talk to all of the different models and manufacturers of printers. And so that made the cost of buying this software expensive because that took a lot of work for the developers of that software to be able to create drivers for every model of printer. And even back in the days of the command line, there were a lot of vendors that were out there selling printers, just like today. So one of the other ideas came up that said, you know, let's make some of this a little bit cheaper. Let's make this a little bit easier and come up with this common interface between the two, the operating systems and the hardware. So here came the concept of Windows. I know I'm drawing lots of little screens for you. So Windows came up, Microsoft, with this idea that said, look, what you can do is you can create a program like a word processing program and all it has to do is be able to talk to Windows. And what we'll do is we'll require everybody who builds a printer to be able to create their own driver that could talk to Windows. That way, the development of the software was much cheaper. And some of you might say, well, I've seen some expensive software, but certainly it depends on the functionality and how complex it was to develop. But all we had to do is make sure that the applications talked to Windows and that the hardware devices would talk to Windows. And Windows would do that translation for us in communicating from the content, let's say, again, of a word processor to the driver that would then communicate to the print device. And that made life so much simpler all the way around because we didn't have to worry about the complexities of trying to be able to match all of the different hardware that was out there. All we had to do is write programs that worked with Windows. Now, one of the things that you're going to see in the discussion we have is just what do file extensions mean to us. And this, again, is a part of how applications and hardware kind of work together with an operating system. But the idea was that we wanted a way, again, to make this easier. If I wanted to open a file, and I was back over here doing this directory command and I saw a list of files. In order for me to open the file, I had to first open a program and then from that program reference the file that I wanted to have opened. And that file might not have even been compatible with the communications of that application. In other words, you might have made the wrong association of which program you thought would open a certain file that you have. So another concept that we have of extensions sometimes called associations is that we found a way to be able to mark each file that we create with a program. And that process made it, again, easy for us in the operating system to be able to open up our content and our files. As an example, if I had a file and all I saw was the name File, how would I know what that's supposed to open with? Again, it would be a guessing game. And so we came up with the concept of putting a period at the end of each of these files and putting what we call an extension. And for the most part, the extensions used to be just three letters in length. And that was also, by the way, because file names could only be a total of 11 characters in length and so it was the combination of what you named it and the extension. Now, of course, they can be much longer than that. Anyway, so what we said is we said, okay, now, operating says this, if somebody opens a file with a .doc as an extension, we're going to associate anything that ends with a .doc with something like Microsoft Word or maybe WordPad so that we know that when we try to open that file, instead of having to first figure out which program to open it with, that we could then just say, okay, you can open the file, the operating system will take care of opening the right application. So there's a number of different types of extensions that you might see. Some like XLS would be one that would open up with a spreadsheet program like Excel. And by the way, these are things you can always change. Some that are a little dangerous if you're not sure what they are, are .exe's. Those are system files, extensions, that in this case is an executable. That would be actual how I would open an application. If I wanted to open up Microsoft Word, I would actually find it named Word.exe. So basically we'll call those applications or apps that would open up. Some things might add automation and actually make changes good or bad to our system. In the old days, we used to have what were called batch files, which were scripts. Today, we use VB scripts a lot. And so again, there's a number of these little system files and extensions that were designed to actually change the way in which applications or the operating system would behave. So the more you know about the file extensions, the better off you are at understanding which applications are going to open by the associations. And again, knowing that the extensions are important when you do create a document, because if I wanted to, I could change an extension, any of us could, but then you might break the functionality of that file. You can always fix it, name it back again, but just as long as you understand what the goal is. And so again, what we're seeing though is that we use the operating system to work with applications and our files, and of course as I talked about with drivers, to be able to talk to the different types of hardware that are connected to the computer, to be able to make it all still happen centrally in the operating system. That's why I said originally, the operating system was your link to the computer and to the attached hardware, and that's what you would interact with to be able to open an application or like I said to print a document, or if you have something like a barcode scanner to be able to work with that or the mouse and the keyboards, all of those usually require some sort of driver. So as I said in the old days of the command line interface, which is what we originally had and still have in today's present world, it was a tricky method of being able to navigate to understand the commands, because they definitely didn't always have user-friendly names. Even by today's standard, many of these commands in the command line interface are limited to an eight-letter word. So you can imagine that if I wanted to know how to open server manager as an example, then you'd have to guess, well, what was the acronym? Because I can't type server manager. Is it SRV, M-N-G-R or something like that? Like I said, the navigation was tricky. Even doing something as simple as creating a new directory or changing the current directory that you want to look inside was something that was tough to do. And if you did run a program, you could only run that one program at a time. If you wanted to run two applications or programs at the same time, we couldn't do that. We had to close the one we were no longer using, open up the next one. So it made even the productivity so much less. So not only was the navigation of the command lines, what we call the hierarchy of the command lines difficult, but also was trying to be as productive as we could. I already mentioned that those applications were expensive because the people that made the applications wanted you to buy their applications, but there's no way they would know did you have a Hewlett Packard printer or any of the existing printers back in those days. They didn't know which one you were going to buy, and so they either had to just say, if you want to buy this software, you got to use this printer, which might not be what people want to do, or they had to drive or create all those drivers to be able to interact with all the hardware that you might be using. So again, the new idea of the operating system was to be in the middle of that communication problem, to be able to help translate all of those commands that you put into the operating system into those command lines, the CLI, by the way, stood for the command line interface, to be able to turn them into the command lines that told the operating system what to do. And that still happens today behind the scenes, even though we don't see the command line interface. We still, you know, one mouse click from you might actually execute hundreds of lines of commands to be able to get the functionality that you want. And again, the new idea was saying, all right, you just have to work with the program. The program just has to work with the operating system, and then we make sure that the hardware talks to the operating system. So in the center of all of this was the operating system to help communicate between the applications and with the hardware. And that idea did drive down a lot of the cost of software programs. You can imagine if you find some of these programs now to be expensive, how much more expensive they would be if the people making them had to make sure they could work with all of the different hardware devices that you have attached to your computer or attached to your network. So what the modern operating system gave us was a visual interface, something we called the graphical user interface. And the idea behind that was to give you a consistent look and feel. The consistency was that when you opened a window or an application that was in a window, that it worked the same way. The way you could close the window or exit the application or make the window larger or smaller or resize the windows to be able to have a menu of consistent commands. That was something we looked for so that we didn't have to worry about how to figure out how to use any particular application. As an example, and I don't mean this in a bad way, there was a very common word processing program used before GUIs came around, which was called WordPerfect. It was a great program, still is a great program. But they used to have to give you a template that you would put on top of your keyboard. And if you wanted to print, you had to remember if it was the F7 key or it was holding the shift button down, hitting the F7 key or if it was the control and the shift and the F8 key or all of these different commands. And if you didn't see your first set of commands, you had to flip this little chart open and flip through several pages of charts to find the command you wanted in the keyboard shortcuts. And so then if you wanted to go to Microsoft Word, you didn't have that same flip chart. And so that's where consistency became a big part of the graphical user interface. So that now, most every application you see has a little picture of a printer. Again, we call it an icon. You click on that and it prints for you. You don't have to worry about memorizing all of these different commands for different programs and it helps you in being able to know how to transition from different applications. So that's what we looked for in the graphical user interface was getting that what again I called the consistency for the look and the feel and the way it worked. Now again, the modern operating system again gave us the drivers for the operating system from the hardware manufacturers. I've talked enough about printers, but there's other devices you might connect. Again, another device might be something I use as a present in the presentation world is a little device I can click on to go from one slide to the next slide in my PowerPoint presentations. And so I had to have a driver that talked to the operating system so it could again actually act as an input device and send a message in that the operating system understood and then the operating system could say, oh, I know what that command is supposed to be on this application. So that communication with drivers actually went both directions. It just depended on whether or not we were sending information into the operating system from hardware or sending the commands out of the operating system to hardware. And it also simplified the setup of hardware because now we don't have to go through all of the work we did in the command line area especially to be able to introduce or to set up different devices of hardware because all we need now is usually just some sort of CD or DVD that has all of the instructions to set up the communications. And so it simplified not only the consistency again of the way in which windows look but also the consistency in how we can set up hardware. It's really made this world more productive in what we can do in working with the computers. And it doesn't make it as a difficult task to learn how to use computers because you know that once you understand what Windows looks like or if you're using a different operating system as long as you know how it works and you have that consistency, it doesn't matter what type of computer you buy. It doesn't matter if you bought an HP computer or a Dell computer or a Samsung or any of these other vendors of computers. All you need to know is how the operating system works and everything else is handled in the back end. Now every operating system has some common features that are important to us. Most of these are in common to almost every type that you might think of. First of all, if the computer's turned off at some point you turn it on it's going to go through a startup routine. That startup routine was designed to be able to check the internal hardware of the computer to make sure everything was working just fine, to find the operating system and to basically load and run that operating system and bring it to the point where you can work and interact with it. Likewise, they all have a shutdown function. Now the shutdown function is important and I'll mention it now and you'll probably hear me say it again, is that it's a controlled turning off of your computer. By controlled what it means is that your operating system is going to make sure that anything that needs to be written to the hard drive before you shut it down is going to be shut down or written to the hard drive I should say so that we don't end up with getting corrupted files. And I haven't talked about the hardware internally so much, and we'll talk about that at the end of this module. But the process of doing a lot of the functions is storing information in what we call memory. Some people call it random access memory. There's different varieties of RAM as we talk about it, but RAM is the type of memory that if it doesn't have power, the data that's stored there will disappear. Unlike your hard drive, as long as you write the changes to the hard drive, you can take the power away and that information is still magnetically written into that hard drive so it's still there when you turn it back on again. Well the problem was if you just pulled the plug and called that your shutdown, all of the information and memory would just disappear. And some of that might have to have been stored so the next time you turn on the computer, those files that the operating system requires are the correct files and that you don't end up with what we call file corruption. So they all have a shutdown feature to safely turn off a computer. Now once you're working with a computer and you think about security issues, if you have your home computer or your home laptop and you're working with your own personal data, maybe you've got some credit card information or purchase history or medical files and you've got to think to yourself, what happens if I walk away from that computer? Well and you walk away from it, what's going to happen is that your screen is still on and people walking up to your computer would be able to access your data. I mean if they know how to use an operating system, everything is there. So many of the operating systems have a feature called locking or lock and what a lock does is it turns off the interactive screen, the windows that you would use until somebody can provide the correct password to be able to bring that back open and so that's why it's called locking. Now you might say well why don't I just shut it down? Well if you shut it down, all the information you were working on will also go away. I mean hopefully it'll shut down and store it on the hard drive but then you'd have to reopen all your programs and get back to where you were. When you lock a computer's operating system, all of those programs are still working in the background. They haven't gone away. When you unlock it by supplying your username and password or maybe a pin number or whatever mechanism you use to log in, that information is still there in the same spot you left it and so it was made very easy for you to be able to leave, know that everything's secure, come back and be able to immediately go back to work or being productive. Now in some cases you have devices that are requiring battery life or battery power. Your portable devices, again a laptop or a tablet of some of those natures. So there's another feature that is something important that also if you set it up right will require a password to get back in. That feature is called hibernate. Now what hibernate does is it basically takes all of the contents in memory, so that the storage location where if there's no power the data is lost. And it takes that and actually stores that information on your hard drive. And you know what's in that memory. That memory is basically keeping track of what windows looked like when you were connected. Which applications were open, which web pages you were on, what data you'd been typing into the application, all of that stored on a hard drive and that way when you take the power out and you lose that information in the memory it's still on the hard drive. Now what happens is that you don't have to when you turn it back on wait for the longer process of the machine doing the initial startup initial load of the operating system and finally getting the operating system to run. What happens is it just simply has to take that information on the hard drive put it back into memory, redraw the screen the way it was when you left and that way you're back to work in a very quick manner. So and it is by the way very fast in the automation mode you're not utilizing any of your battery power. Now there's also another option where you may have computers that are being used by more than one person. And so what we have is a feature of log on and log off. Now again the idea of logging on is basically the same as what you would do when you first start up a machine start up any operating system. You have to log on to that computer with a username and password. At least most often that's what we see on Windows 8 where we see more emphasis on security even more than we saw with Windows 7. But if I'm done for the day and I don't want to shut down the computer and I don't need to hibernate the computer but I don't want people using my account you can log off. By logging off you'll close the applications that you were working on unlike hibernate that would actually keep them available the next time you turned it on and brought the power back. But that way another person can come in after you they can have their own log on and not have access to your information. Now these features like I said are common with most every operating system but it's important that you understand that even though I'm doing a focus on Windows 7 and Windows 8 that there are other operating systems that are available to you. A very popular brand of operating system is called Linux, L-I-N-U-X. Now Linux does have a command line interface. That's primarily what it's known for really into the programming world like this type of interface but it also has what's called an X window which brings up a graphical user interface that has a lot of look and feel like your operating system with Microsoft. Obviously the world of Apple has their own operating systems and also has a command line interface and that's another popular one. Now again it will have consistency from versions of applications running on the Macintosh operating system the Mac OS that will be different though than the look and feel of Windows. So when I talk about the consistency what I'm getting at is if you choose to use Windows if you choose to use Linux if you choose to use the Macintosh operating system that the applications will all look and feel the same on that one operating system. So everything I launch in a Macintosh system is going to have the same method of closing the windows of making them larger just like in Windows everything I open will have that same look and feel and that's what's important about an operating system is that it gives you that consistency not necessarily between the different vendors but for the programs you run on those systems. The directory infrastructure is what we call the way in which we store and organize our files. We start off with a container that we often call a folder. Now the folder itself doesn't contain data that is designed as a placeholder. Now I don't draw very good pictures of folders but that would be my folder and we'll call it my documents folder and within that folder I might choose to have a number of subfolders because if these are all my documents I'm going to imagine that I make more than one type of document that I might actually have some documents that maybe contain personal information like a resume or I might have another folder in here to organize all of my spreadsheets that I create or another folder that has all of my databases because it's easier with organization I'll call this access because that's one of the programs that is a database program. So we call them folders or containers because we're just organizing our data. What's important to know is that we can find things well organized by going to the top level folder and then when we open it we'll see all of these bottom level or subfolders that are in there and I'll put org because that's what we're doing with those organizing things and then within those folders we might actually see the actual files that are listed and hopefully if you have good organizational skills that they're all of the same type that makes sense with that folder and that way you have the ability to really find information that you need. Now we know sometimes you might store a file in the wrong folder that can certainly happen or you might decide maybe I need to reclassify it. So the other nice thing about the directory infrastructure or about the operating system especially is the ease in which you can move your data around. So moving the data is one thing, moving the data means that you're going to take an actual file and take that original file and move it to another folder. By moving what I'm saying is I'm removing it from the access subfolder and putting it into the sheets or the spreadsheets subfolder. Now that's different than a copy. A copy leaves the original and makes a copy of that file so that you now have that same file inside your destination. You basically have two of them, they're just in different locations. So we call that copy. Now moving is very much the same as the cut operation and most of you probably know it by cut and paste. In fact, that's another part of the function here is that if you do copy something you have to decide where you're going to paste that copy. And so when you cut a file that's the same thing as again as removing it from where it is and moving it, pasting it put a paste over here into the new location. So you could say that the move function is the function of both copy and paste. Now I have to tell you that is so much easier to do that graphically than what it took for us to do it in the command line. In the command line you'd have to use a command like copy, well that doesn't sound so hard, but then you'd have to put the full path of all the folders you had to go through to be able to get to that file and then you had to put in the new place where you wanted that file to be located. And so that meant that if you didn't know their names you had to stop what you're doing, do a lot of change directories and directory commands and that's why I was talking about the fact that the operating system might actually be doing several commands behind the scenes for you to be able to give you that functionality that you don't have to worry about. Now most of the structure the infrastructure of these directories are going to give you a search feature. So if you decide well I don't remember how I classified a document but I need to find it. You could do a search until your operating system something specific to search for like if you know you had something called my spreadsheet and you just don't remember where it is then you could do that search at a top level folder and that search would go through all of the folders down below until it found one or more of those files that have those words in it, my spreadsheet. Of course you wouldn't find any of those, you wouldn't see any results. So again it makes it easy to find data and that's also important because we don't want to be sitting there taking hours trying to take care of this entire process. Now one of the early security things that I want to talk about and I'm just bringing it up now you'll see some examples of how this is done but one of the early things that I want you to know about security is that your data is very important to you and you don't want it to ever be taken from you and how could it be taken? Well here's an example, many people have laptops and these laptops contain inside of them a hard drive that is all of your data and a lot of times if you're working out in a public arena or maybe you've got it locked in the car where the case is some people try to secure it, they may try to add passwords so that you just can't log in or some places actually sell like a little padlock that you can hook onto the laptop and tie it down on a table somewhere and you know I got to tell you as a person who works in the hacking arena if I wanted your data I don't care where your laptop is I don't care if you lock it down because all I need to do is smash it open and steal your hard drive once I steal your hard drive I can hook it up to my windows computer and look at all of your data so encryption is a very important function for the security of your data in fact as you move further and further into the ideas of security you'll see that we tell you that your information should be encrypted both when it's in motion and at rest what does it mean at rest when it's stored on the hard drive it's at rest what does it mean if it's in motion if you take your file and decide to send it out through an email to somebody it's encrypted so that if anybody intercepts it that they would be able to read your data that would be the in motion part now I mentioned this with NTFS there's many other ways but that's a free encryption feature that you have with a variety of different windows operating systems and it's very important to know that you can add that level of encryption with your files alright another part of what we do in the directory infrastructure is we worry about how much space we have on our hard drive and so we try to find ways to get this amount of storage room to increase now that was especially true many years ago many years ago I remember when we had a size of a 20 megabyte hard drive now by today's standards one big word document with pictures and graphics could be the size of that entire hard drive we're measuring things in so many so much larger storage so obviously I was talking about even in the mid 90's that we had so little room so compression was another way of saving or reducing the size of a file just as an idea behind what compression would be is we looked at your documents and if we saw I'm not going to write a full letter here but just a series of we're looking at your text files and maybe we see a common set of character strings I'm just writing nonsense here and so what compression is it looks for patterns oh look here's a pattern of ABC that is repeated a couple of times so you know what it did is it said alright let's put a variable let's just put a variable we'll call it the variable number one and replace the number one for ABC instead of having three characters there I have just one character and then I create a little chart that says everywhere you see that symbol number one replace it with ABC so when you open the file the decompression would recreate it the same ways that it originally looked and we can see those same patterns in the middle of pictures and images and so it's a way of just being able to reduce the size that we need for storing a file in a hard drive it also made it faster for us because it's an attachment because it's a smaller file it can be sent faster it doesn't take as much bandwidth to be able to send that information but again I'm getting a little outside of the directory infrastructure but what I'm talking about is that we can encrypt files that we create and we can compress files that we create all is a part of how we manage the directory of our computers so you probably think boy I've heard you already had enough on this hardware issue but let's make sure we have a good understanding hardware is something you can usually physically see and touch kind of the idea that if you can grab it and throw out the window and it breaks it's hardware of course then it's brokenware at that point but there's a number of different types of hardware devices and they all have different functions a device where we have output from our computer now remember I like to draw the laptops and there's the operating system running on that computer well other things come out of a computer besides the request print obviously we might have information coming out to a speaker so we can have sound that comes out and plays our music files or whether we're streaming videos or just wanting to hear the operating system make beings or the sound of a bomb as you make mistakes with the different commands that are out there other types of hardware we didn't talk about those of you who are in the gaming world who might have some sort of hopefully that looks like one of those Xbox type of pads for joysticks that you might be using all of these are examples of hardware and hardware is designed to facilitate the idea of I-O input output so what I've shown you here right now is a couple of examples of hardware that was designed for output output would of course being that we're sending information from the operating system now some of you might have a microphone and so here's a microphone on one of those stands there or of course the famous keyboard and a pointing device which is what we often call the mouse that we would use to connect and those would be examples of input types of devices and that's because we're going to send sound in or we're going to send signals in about what we're clicking on in the operating system and as I said all of these hardware devices have to be able to talk to the operating system and that's why I'm re-emphasizing the idea of drivers is that it's a way of communicating to the operating system and remember that the software applications that you use are communicating to the operating system as well and that means that you personally only have to click a button to play a musical song and you don't have to enter any commands that tells the operating system how to talk to that speaker that's what the driver does it translates all of that now I just want to give you another security issue I believe security should be something we think about from day one in anything we do with this digital technology I say that as a person who does a lot of work in that security realm and yet even I a week ago had my bank call me to tell me that somebody had somehow swiped my debit card number and started opening up an online yahoo wallet with it fortunately they caught it before I did and stopped that entire process no matter how much you do with security it's important to hear this you're going to eventually get to a point where you're going to buy a new piece of hardware and you're going to need to download a driver and downloading a driver means that maybe you lost the CD or the DVD ROM that the driver was on and so when you download these drivers what you need to know is that many of them need to be what's called digitally signed digital signing is a way of guaranteeing that the program the driver that you're downloading came from the manufacturer and wasn't something that some evil hacker out there tried to pretend was a driver in the effort to take over your computer and to earn your or to steal your personal information so we look at that and Windows is very good at giving you a warning if something you are downloading has not been signed in other words verified that it came from the actual manufacturer or vendor of the hardware device that you're using and again the idea of having a graphical user interface the idea of Windows was to give you consistency and to be able to basically reduce as I said the cost of what it took to develop applications we want any application you open to have consistency in how you manage that application running now inside of each application they may have different functions different buttons because obviously a spreadsheet is different than a database you have a letter that you're writing and so they'll have commands inside the application but we want that consistency and that's what the graphical user interface we call it the GUI gives you and as I mentioned for those of you who have an idea that you might want to get further into things the command line interface still exists on almost every operating system that I've seen but that's where you're typing commands and not clicking on anything to make that happen in the background now one of the things that I want you to understand is how to navigate through Windows and to be able to change things about Windows to make it easier for you and what I'm going to introduce to you is this area called the control panel now the control panel is something you'll probably come across and it allows you to change settings potentially security settings such as whether or not you want to use the Windows firewall or this really cool thing called the Windows Defender which was designed to prevent viruses from infecting your computer or maybe you just don't like the way your mouse feels when you move it on the mouse pad now that's something we're going to make it feel different on the mouse pad but if you move your hand from one edge of the mouse pad to the other edge did the mouse go all the way across the screen or did it just move a couple of inches some people like to speed that up so they don't have to move their hand as much or maybe they want to change the button combination because they're left handed and not right handed which is how the mouse is designed and these are examples of things you can do in the control panel to make things better and to make hopefully more efficient for you another common interface that we see is the web browser again the idea of a web browser was to present a window that has a consistent look and feel like your operating systems for all of the websites that you go to and we'll certainly give you an introduction and show you some of the basic usage of the web browser to be able to search for different websites to be able to go back to an old website or to store a website as a place you can come back to later in case you forget what that website is so we're going to show you some of those features but again regardless of which page you go to the idea is is that we want you to be able to know how to navigate so that it doesn't matter what is the content on the page but where it's located and how to get to it and how to be able to move around now I'm going to revisit the directory that was the directory infrastructure the way in which we store your information through the containers we called folders or the sub folders and again like I said that's kind of up to your organizational skills what you're going to see when we get into Windows 7 is they have a tool called Windows Explorer it got renamed to file explorer in Windows 8 but it gives you the same capability and remember the idea was is that helps you organize your information to be able to give you search features and even options about how to see those files if you have like a folder filled with a bunch of your personal photographs you can make it so that when you're looking at the list of files or pictures that instead of it just being the name of a picture that it can be a little icon that has kind of a small shrunken down version of what that picture is I mean the actual picture it's kind of like you might have a beautiful landscape photo and now it looks like a little wallet size but it makes it easy for you to be able to search and find and view your information now I do want you to know there are some things in the directory infrastructure in some very important locations like in the Windows folder that will have files and folders that are technically there but you're not supposed to see them you actually have the ability to unhide these files and folders but I just want to tell you the reason they're hidden is to protect you from deleting them and making your operating system crash so don't be surprised sometimes if you come across a hidden file or folder I'll certainly show you through your view options how you can see them if you want to I'll also show you how you'll be able to look at those extensions that I talked about and the importance again of those extensions to link them with the programs or the applications that are stored on your operating system now over time the different operating systems including Windows are going to have new features and those features are going to come to you in the form of updates now you may see and come across messages that tells you sometimes that there are new updates to install the updates as I said were designed to either fix a problem that might have occurred what we call a bug the idea I guess is that you know the bug gets into the system or you know bug if you're making a cake batter and a bug gets in it kind of ruins the whole batter those bugs, those unwanted features is another way to put it in a hopefully funny way can be fixed through updates as well as I said adding new features now in some cases there may be worse bugs that we call a vulnerability that means it's a weakness that was discovered in the operating system that if a hacker took the advantage of that weakness they could take over your system and steal your information so you'll also see a series of patches coming out periodically from a company like Microsoft to be able to make the repairs to those vulnerabilities and so it's important that you understand that updates and patches are something you need to keep up on as you're working with your operating system so that you can stay safe and get the benefits of the new features and potentially get rid of problems the bugs that are in the operating system sometimes they come in the form of what's called a hot fix which means it's trying to fix a specific little bug, you install the software and then you're done and that problem will basically be gone