By David Pogue
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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Welcome Center, Desktop, and the Start Menu

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Microsoft wants to make one thing perfectly clear: Windows Vista isn't just a whole new ballgame—it's practically a different sport. Compared with Windows XP, Vista is different on the surface, under the hood, and everywhere in between. (It's so different, in fact, that this book includes an appendix called "Where'd It Go?," which lets you look up a familiar Windows landmark and figure out where Microsoft stuck it in Vista.)

But you'll discover all that for yourself, beginning with the very first time you turn on your Vista computer.

It's hard to predict exactly what you'll see at that fateful moment. It may be a big welcome screen bearing the logo of Dell or whomever; it may be the Vista Setup Wizard (Appendix A); or it may be the login screen, where you're asked to sign in by clicking your name in a list. (Skip to Section 23.7 for details on logging in.)

Eventually, though, you arrive at something that looks like Figure 1-1: the shining majesty of the new Vista Welcome Center.

Figure 1-1: The Welcome Center, new in Windows Vista, offers links to various useful corners of the operating system. Most are designed to help you set up a new PC. (Click once to read a description, and then double-click to open the link.)

The Welcome Center is supposed to be an antidote to the moment of dizzy disorientation that you'd otherwise feel the first time you fire up Vista. It's basically a window full of links to useful places in the Vista empire. Click a link once to read its description in the top part of the window, or twice to open up the control panel or program you need to make changes.

Here are a few highlights (you may have to click "Show all 14 items" to see them):

• View computerdetails. Click this icon to read, in the top pane of the Welcome Center, the tech specs of your computer: its name, how much memory it has, what processor chip is inside, which graphics card you have, and so on.
  For even gorier statistical details about your PC's guts, click the "Show more details" link. You're taken directly to the System control panel (Section 8.3.39). Here's where you can find your Windows Experience Index, a single-digit assessment of your machine's overall horsepower. (See the box below.)

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The Welcome Center: All Versions

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The Welcome Center is supposed to be an antidote to the moment of dizzy disorientation that you'd otherwise feel the first time you fire up Vista. It's basically a window full of links to useful places in the Vista empire. Click a link once to read its description in the top part of the window, or twice to open up the control panel or program you need to make changes.

Here are a few highlights (you may have to click "Show all 14 items" to see them):

• View computerdetails. Click this icon to read, in the top pane of the Welcome Center, the tech specs of your computer: its name, how much memory it has, what processor chip is inside, which graphics card you have, and so on.
  For even gorier statistical details about your PC's guts, click the "Show more details" link. You're taken directly to the System control panel (Section 8.3.39). Here's where you can find your Windows Experience Index, a single-digit assessment of your machine's overall horsepower. (See the box below.)
• Transfer files and settings. The Vista program called Windows Easy Transfer is a substantially beefed-up version of the old Files & Settings Transfer Wizard. Its purpose is to transfer files and settings from an older PC, and it's described on Section A.7.
• Add new users. If you're the lord of the manor, the sole user of this computer, you can ignore this little item. But if you and other family members, students, or workers share this computer, you'll want to consult Chapter 23 about how to set up a separate account (name, password, and working environment) for each person.
• Personalize Windows. Sure, sure, eventually you'll be plotting rocket trajectories and mapping the genome—but let's not kid ourselves. The first order of business is decorating: choosing your screen saver, replacing the desktop background (wallpaper), choosing a different cursor shape, adjusting your monitor resolution, and so on. Double-click here to open the appropriate control panel.
  Quick—which computer is better, an AMD Turion 64 ML-34 processor at 1.80 gigahertz but only 512 megs of RAM, or a Core Duo 2.0 gigahertz with 1 gig of RAM but only a Radon Xpress 200M graphics card?

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The Vista Desktop—Now with Aero!: Home Premium • Business • Enterprise • Ultimate

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Once you've recovered from the excitement of the Welcome Center, you get your first glimpse of the full Vista desktop.

All of the usual Windows landmarks are here—the Start menu, taskbar, and Recycle Bin—but they've been given a drastic cosmetic overhaul.

If you're into this kind of thing, here's the complete list of what makes Aero Aero:

• The edges of windows are thicker (for easier targeting with your mouse). Parts of the Start menu and window edges are transparent. Windows and dialog boxes cast subtle shadows on the background, as though they're floating.
• A new, bigger, more modern font is used for menus and labels.
• When you point to a window button without clicking, the button "lights up." The Minimize and Maximize buttons glow blue; the Close button glows red.
• The default button in a dialog box—the one Microsoft thinks you really want, like Save or Print—pulses gently, using fading color intensity to draw your eye.
  The Vista desktop, like the XP desktop before it, is a victim of Microsoft's clean-freak tendencies. It's awfully pretty—but awfully barren. Windows veterans may miss the handy desktop icons that once provided quick access to important locations on your PC, like My Computer, My Documents, My Network Places, and Internet Explorer.

  You can still get to these locations—they're listed in your Start menu—but opening them requires two mouse clicks (including one to open the Start menu)—an egregious expenditure of caloric effort.

  However, if you miss the older arrangement, it's easy enough to put these icons back on the desktop. To do so, right-click a blank spot on the desktop; from the shortcut menu, choose Personalize.

  Now the Personalization dialog box appears. In the Tasks pane on the left side, click "Change desktop icons."

  As shown here, checkboxes for the common desktop icons await your summons: Computer, Network, Internet Explorer, Control Panel, and User's Files (that is, your Personal folder—see Section 1.17).

  Turn on the ones you'd like to install onto the desktop and then click OK. Your old favorite icons are now back where they once belonged.
• Little animations liven up the works, especially when you minimize, maximize, or close a window.

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The Start Menu: All Versions

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Windows Vista is composed of 50 million lines of computer code, scattered across your hard drive in thousands of files. The vast majority of them are support files, there for behind-the-scenes use by Windows and your applications—they're not for you. They may as well bear a sticker saying, "No user-serviceable parts inside."

That's why the Start menu is so important. It lists every useful piece of software on your computer, including commands, programs, and files. Just about everything you do on your PC begins—or can begin—with your Start menu.

In Vista, as you've probably noticed, the word Start no longer appears on the Start menu; now the Start menu is just a round, backlit, glass pebble with a Windows logo behind it. But it's still called the Start menu, and it's still the gateway to everything on the PC.

If you're the type who bills by the hour, you can open the Start menu (Figure 1-3) by clicking it with the mouse. If you're among those who feel that life's too short, however, open it by tapping the key on the keyboard instead. (If your antique, kerosene-operated keyboard has no key, pressing Ctrl+Esc does the same thing.)

Figure 1-3: Left: The Start menu's top-left section is yours to play with. You can "pin" whatever programs you want here, in whatever order you like. The lower-left section lists programs you use most often. (You can delete individual items here—see Section 1.21.3—but you can't add things manually or rearrange them.) The right-hand column links to important Windows features and folder locations.
Right: The All Programs menu replaces the left column of the Start menu, listing almost every piece of software you've got. You can rearrange, add to, or delete items from this list.

To find out what something is—something in your Start menu, All Programs menu, or indeed anywhere on your desktop—point to it with your cursor without clicking. A shaded, rectangular Tooltip bar appears, containing a text description. (If the Tooltip doesn't appear, it might be that the window you're pointing to isn't the active window on your desktop. Click the window and then try again.)

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What's in the Start Menu: All Versions

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The following pages take you on a whirlwind tour of the Start menu itself—from the bottom up, left to right, the way your mouse encounters its contents as it moves up from the Start button.

When you click All Programs, you're presented with an important list indeed: the master catalog of every program on your computer. You can jump directly to your word processor, calendar, or favorite game, for example, just by choosing its name from the Start→All Programs menu.

In Vista, as you'll notice very quickly, Microsoft abandoned the superimposed-menus effect of Windows XP. Rather than covering up the regularly scheduled Start menu, the All Programs list replaces it (or at least the left-side column of it).

You can restore the original left-side column by clicking Back (at the bottom of the list) or pressing the Esc key.

When the Start menu is open, you can open the All Programs menu in a number of ways: by clicking the phrase "All Programs," by pointing to it and keeping the mouse still for a moment, or by pressing the up arrow key (to highlight All Programs) and then tapping the Enter key, the right arrow key, or the Space bar.

Keyboard fanatics—once the programs list is open, you can also choose anything in it without involving the mouse. Just type the first few letters of a program's a folder's name, or press the up and down arrow keys, to highlight the item you want. Then press Enter to seal the deal.

As you'll quickly discover, the All Programs list in Vista doesn't just list programs. It also houses a number of folders.

Section 1.4.2.1: Software-company folders

Some of them bear the names of software you've installed; you might see a folder called, for example, Urge (Microsoft's online music-store partner) or Logitech. These generally contain programs, uninstallers, instruction manuals, and other related junk.

Submenus, also known as cascading menus, have been largely eliminated from the Start menu. Instead, when you open something that contains other things—like a folder listed in the Start menu—you see its contents listed beneath, indented slightly, as shown in Figure 1-5. Click the folder name again to collapse the sublisting.

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Start→ (Sleep): All Versions

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The button, at the bottom of the Start menu's right column, is the trigger for one of Vista's most useful new features, Sleep mode. Yes, that's right: one of the best things about Vista is how it behaves when you turn it off.

Millions of people shut their PCs off every day, but they shouldn't; it's a huge, colossal waste of time on both ends. When you shut down, you have to wait for all your programs to close—and then the next morning, you have to reopen everything, reposition your windows, and get everything back the way you had it.

Millions of other people, therefore, avoid the whole problem by leaving their computers on all the time. That, of course, represents a massive waste of electricity and isn't great for the environment.

A few people knew about Standby mode and used that instead. This special state of PC consciousness reduced the amount of electricity the computer used, putting it in suspended animation until you used the mouse or keyboard to begin working again. Whatever programs or documents you were working on remained in memory.

When using a laptop on battery power, Standby was a real boon. When the flight attendant handed over your microwaved chicken teriyaki, you could take a break without closing all your programs or shutting down the computer.

Unfortunately, there were two big problems with Standby, especially for laptops:

• The PC still drew a trickle of power this way. If you didn't use your laptop for a few days, the battery would silently go dead—and everything you had open and unsaved would be lost forever.
• Drivers or programs sometimes interfered with Standby, so your laptop remained on even though it was closed inside your carrying case. Your plane would land on the opposite coast, you'd pull out the laptop for the big meeting, and you'd discover that (a) the thing was roasting hot, and (b) the battery was dead.

In Windows Vista, Microsoft has fixed Standby. Now it's called Sleep, and now it doesn't present those problems.

First, drivers and applications are no longer allowed to interrupt the Sleep process. No more Hot Laptop Syndrome.

Second, the instant you put the computer to sleep, Vista quietly transfers a copy of everything in memory into an invisible file on the hard drive. But at the same time, it still keeps everything alive in memory, in case you return to the laptop (or desktop) and want to dive back into work.

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Start→ (Lock): All Versions

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Also at the bottom of the Start menu's right side, you'll find this little padlock button. Clicking it locks your computer—in essence, it throws a sheet of inch-thick steel over everything you were doing, hiding your screen from view. This is an ideal way to protect your PC from nosy people who happen to wander by your desk while you're away getting coffee or lunch.

All they'll find on your monitor is the standard Logon screen described on Section 23.7. They (and even you) will have to enter your account password to get past it (Section 23.5.2).

You can trigger this button, too, entirely from the keyboard. Hit these keys, in sequence: , right arrow (twice), Enter.

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Start→Log Off, Restart, Hibernate, Shut Down: All Versions

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To the right off the little icon at the bottom of the Start menu is a small arrow button. As shown in Figure 1-6, it offers a more complete listing of ways to end your work session.

Figure 1-6: It just wouldn't be Microsoft if you didn't have nine different ways to end a work session. Two of them, Sleep and Lock, are duplicated in the form of theandbuttons to the left of the little ▸ button.

Your options include:

So if Sleep is so great, why is there still a Hibernate command?

Sleep mode is a two-stage affair (Section 1.5). If you wake up the computer within 15 minutes of putting it to Sleep, all your programs and windows pop open instantly, because your PC has been using a thin trickle of power to keep them in memory.

If you wake up the computer after 15 minutes, you wait slightly longer (30 seconds), because the PC is retrieving your memorized working environment from the hard drive, which is slower.

Hibernate, in other words, is exactly the same as the second phase of Sleep. When you tell the PC to Hibernate, it stores a copy of the open programs on the hard drive and cuts power immediately—no 15 minutes of standby first.

And now, to the question—why?

First, going straight to Hibernate saves a slight amount of power, because you eliminate that 15 minutes of keeping the RAM alive. Second, you save 15 minutes of heat buildup in your laptop bag.

Minor differences, to be sure—but at least now you know.

• Switch User. This command refers to Vista's accounts feature, in which each person who uses this PC gets to see his own desktop picture, email account, files, and so on. (See Chapter 23.)
  When you choose Switch User, somebody else can log into the computer with her own name and password—to do a quick calendar or email check, for example. But whatever you had running remains open behind the scenes. After the interloper is finished, you can log in again to find all of your open programs and documents exactly as you left them.
  In Windows XP, the Switch User command was available only if you had turned on something called Fast User Switching. In Vista, there's no Off switch; Fast User Switching is in effect full time.

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Start→Help and Support: All Versions

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Choosing Start→Help and Support opens the new, improved Windows Help and Support Center window, which is described in Chapter 5.

Once again, speed fans have an alternative to using the mouse—just press the F1 key to open the Help window. (If that doesn't work, some other program may have Vista's focus. Try it again after clicking the desktop.)

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Start→Default Programs: All Versions

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This command is just a shortcut to the Default Programs control panel.

It has two functions:

• To let you specify which program (not necessarily Microsoft's) you want to use as your Web browser, email program, instant-messaging program, Java module, and music player—a choice offered by Microsoft to placate the U.S. Justice Department. Details are on Section 6.10.3.1.
• To specify which program opens when you double-click a certain kind of document. For example, if you double-click a JPEG graphic, do you want it to open in Photoshop or Windows Photo Gallery? Details on Section 6.10.2.

Windows veterans may want to note that this file-association function used to be called File Types, and it was in the Folder Options window.

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Start→Control Panel: All Versions

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This extremely important command opens an extremely important window: the Control Panel, which houses over 50 mini-programs that you'll use to change almost every important setting on your PC. It's so important, in fact, that it gets a chapter of its own (Chapter 8).

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Start→Connect To: All Versions

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This command opens the "Connect to a network" dialog box, a simple list of all dial-up, VPN (virtual private networking), and wireless networks that your computer can "see" at the moment.

Take special note of this option if you have a laptop or some other mobile PC, because this window offers a simple, clear means of seeing what wireless networks are available (and connecting to a good one). You'll find details on hooking up to a wireless network in Chapter 9.

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Start→Network: All Versions

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We've come a long way since the My Network Places icon that once graced every Windows desktop.

Now, just choosing Start→Network opens a single, ready-to-use window containing icons of all nearby computers that are on the same network, ready to open and browse for files and folders your comrades have decided to share with you. (It's the equivalent of the View Workgroup Computers command in Windows XP.)

Details on networking in Vista are in Chapters 23, 24, 25, and 26.

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Start→Computer: All Versions

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The Computer command is the trunk lid, the doorway to every single shred of software on your machine. When you choose this command, a window opens to reveal icons that represent each disk drive (or drive partition) in your machine, as shown in Figure 1-7.

Figure 1-7: The Computer window lists your PC's drives—hard drives, CD drives, USB flash drives, and so on; you may see networked drives listed here, too. This computer has two hard drives, a USB flash drive, and a CD-ROM drive. (If there's a disk in the CD drive, you see its name, not just its drive letter.) When you select a disk icon, the Details pane (if visible) shows its capacity and amount of free space (bottom).

Some of the commands that populated the Start menus of previous Windows versions no longer appear in the Start menu of Vista. Microsoft is trying to make its new operating system look less overwhelming.

But if you miss some of the old folders—Favorites, Printers, and the Run command, for example—it's easy enough to put them back.

Right-click the Start menu. From the shortcut menu, choose Properties. Now the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog box appears; click the Customize button.

In the scrolling list, you'll find checkboxes and buttons that hide or show all kinds of things that can appear in the right column of the Start menu: Computer, Connect To, Control Panel, Default Programs, Documents, Favorites, Games, Help, Music, Network, Pictures, Printers, Run, Search, and System Administrative Tools (a set of utilities described in Chapter 20).

Click OK twice to return to the desktop and try out your changes.

For example, by double-clicking your hard drive icon and then the various folders on it, you can eventually see the icons for every single file and folder on your computer. (The Computer icon no longer appears on the desktop—unless you put it there, as described on Section 1.2.)

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Start→Recent Items: All Versions

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When you click or highlight this command, a submenu sprouts to the right, listing the last 15 documents you've opened. The point, of course, is that you can reopen one just by clicking its name.

This list can save you time when you want to resume work on something you had open recently, but you're not in the mood to burrow through folders to find its icon.

Note, however, that:

• Documents appear on the Recent Items list only if your applications are smart enough to update it. Most modern programs (including all Microsoft programs) perform this administrative task, but not all do.
• The Recent Items list doesn't know when you've deleted a document or moved it to another folder or disk; it continues to list the file even after it's gone. In that event, clicking the document's listing produces only an error message. (At least the message now offers to delete the listing from Recent Items so you don't confuse yourself again the next time.)
• Some people consider Recent Items a privacy risk, since it reveals everything you've been up to recently to whatever spouse or buddy happens to wander by. (You know who you are.)
  In that case, you can remove Recent Items from the Start menu altogether. Right-click the Start button itself; from the shortcut menu, choose Properties. In the resulting dialog box, turn off "Store and display a list of recently opened files." Click OK.
  Of course, there's another easy way to open a document you've recently worked on. To start, simply open the program you used to create it. Many programs maintain a list of recent documents at the bottom of the File menu; choose one of these names to open the corresponding file.

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Start→Search: All Versions

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This very, very juicy new feature is one of the most compelling reasons to upgrade to Windows Vista. It's the new, superfast, system-wide Search feature, and it's described in depth in Chapter 3.

This Search command isn't quite the same thing as the Search box at the bottom of the Start menu. This one gives you more control. For example, the window that appears when you use this Search lets you confine your search to photos, documents, email messages, and so on.

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Start→Games: All Versions

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This item is nothing but a shortcut to Vista's Games folder (Section 7.18). Good to know when there's time to kill.

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Start→Music, Pictures: All Versions

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Microsoft correctly assumes that most people these days use their home computers for managing digital photos and music albums that have been downloaded or copied from CDs. As you can probably guess, the Pictures and Music folders are intended to house your photo and tune collections—and these Start menu commands are quick ways to open them.

So why did Microsoft bury your files in a folder three levels deep?

Because Vista has been designed from the ground up for computer sharing. It's ideal for any situation where different family members, students, or workers share the same PC.

Each person who uses the computer will turn on the machine to find his own separate desktop picture, set of files, Web bookmarks, font collection, and preference settings. (You'll find much more about this feature in Chapter 23.)

Like it or not, Vista considers you one of these people. If you're the only one who uses this PC, fine—simply ignore the sharing features. But in its little software head, Vista still considers you an account holder, and stands ready to accommodate any others who should come along.

In any case, now you should see the importance of the Users folder in the main hard drive window. Inside are folders—the Personal folders—named for the different people who use this PC. In general, nobody is allowed to touch what's inside anybody else's folder.

If you're the sole proprietor of the machine, of course, there's only one Personal folder in the Users folder—named for you. (You can ignore the Public folder, which is described on Section 26.1.1.)

This is only the first of many examples in which Vista imposes a fairly rigid folder structure. Still, the approach has its advantages. By keeping such tight control over which files go where, Vista keeps itself pure—and very, very stable. (Other operating systems known for their stability, such as Windows 2000 and Mac OS X, work the same way.)

Furthermore, keeping all of your stuff in a single folder makes it very easy for you to back up your work. It also makes life easier when you try to connect to your machine from elsewhere in the office (over the network) or elsewhere in the world (over the Internet), as described in Chapter 26 and 27.

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Start→Documents: All Versions

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This command opens up your Documents folder, a very important folder indeed. It's designed to store just about all the work you do on your PC—everything except Music, Pictures, and Videos, which get folders of their own.

Of course, you're welcome to file your documents anywhere on the hard drive, but most programs propose the Documents folder as the target location for newly created documents.

Sticking with that principle makes a lot of sense, because it makes navigation easy. You never have to wonder where you filed something, since all your stuff is sitting right there in Documents.

The Documents folder actually sits in the Computer→Local Disk (C:)→Users→[Your Name] folder.)

If you study that path carefully, it should become clear that what's in Documents when you log in (Section 23.7) isn't the same thing that other people will see when they log in. That is, each account holder (Chapter 23) has a different Documents folder, whose contents switch according to who's logged in.

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Start→[Your Name]: The Personal Folder: All Versions

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As the box on the facing page makes clear, Windows Vista keeps all of your stuff—your files, folders, email, pictures, music, bookmarks, even settings and preferences—in one handy, central location: your Personal folder. That's a folder bearing your name (or whatever account name you typed when you installed Vista).

Everyone with an account on your PC has a Personal folder—even if you're the only one with an account.

See Chapter 23 for the full scoop on user accounts.

Technically, your Personal folder lurks inside the C:→Users folder. But that's a lot of burrowing when you just want a view of your entire empire.

That's why your Personal folder is also listed here, at the top of the Start menu's right-side column. Choose this listing to open the folder that you'll eventually fill with new folders, organize, back up, and so on.

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Start→Run: All Versions

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A clean, new installation of Vista doesn't include the Run command. But power users and über-geeks may well want to put it back in the Start menu, following the instructions in the box. (Or don't bother. Whenever you want the Run command, you can just press +R, or type run into the Start menu's Search box and then hit Enter.)

After all, the Run command gets you to a command line, as shown in Figure 1-8. A command line is a text-based method of performing a task. You type a command, click OK, and something happens as a result.

Figure 1-8: Top: The last Run command you entered appears automatically in the Open text box. You can use the drop-down list to see a list of commands you've previously entered.
Bottom: The Run command knows the names of all of your folders and also remembers the last few commands you typed here. As you go, you're shown the best match for the characters you're typing. When the name of the folder you're trying to open appears in the list, click it to prevent having to type the rest of the entry.

The command line in the Run dialog box is primarily for opening things. Vista also comes with a program called Command Prompt that offers a far more complete environment—not just for opening things, but for controlling and manipulating them. Power users can type long sequences of commands and symbols in Command Prompt.

Working at the command line is becoming a lost art in the world of Windows, because most people prefer to issue commands by choosing from menus using the mouse. However, some old-timers still love the command line, and even mouse-lovers encounter situations where a typed command is the only way to do something.

If you're a PC veteran, your head probably teems with neat Run commands you've picked up over the years. If you're new to this idea, however, the following are a few of the useful and timesaving functions you can perform with the Run dialog box.

For example, you can use the Run command as a program launcher. Just type any program's program file name in the Open text box and then press Enter. That's a useful shortcut for both pros and novices alike, because it's frequently faster to launch a program this way than to click the Start→All Programs menu with the mouse.

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Customizing the Start Menu: All Versions

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It's possible to live a long and happy life without ever tampering with the Start menu. In fact, for many people, the idea of making it look or work differently comes dangerously close to nerd territory.

Still, knowing how to manipulate the Start menu listings may come in handy someday, and provides an interesting glimpse into the way Windows works. And tweaking it to reflect your way of doing things can pay off in efficiency down the road.

Thanks to the User Accounts feature described in Chapter 23, any changes you make to the Start menu apply only to you. Each person with an account on this PC has an independent, customized Start menu. When you sign onto the machine using your name and password, Windows Vista loads your customized Start menu.

Microsoft offers a fascinating set of customization options for the Start menu. It's hard to tell whether these options were selected by a scientific usability study or by a dartboard, but you're likely to find something that suits you.

To view and change the basic options, right-click the Start menu; from the shortcut menu, choose Properties. Now the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog box opens, as seen in Figure 1-10.

Figure 1-10: Top: On this first screen, you can turn off the new, improved Vista two-column Start menu design to return to the single-column Classic Start menu design of Windows versions gone by. Click Customize to get to the good stuff. (The Privacy checkboxes refer to the lower-left section of the Start menu, which lists the programs you use most often, and the Recent Items submenu, which lists documents you've had open. Turn these off if you don't want to risk your supervisor coming by while you're up getting coffee, and noticing that your most recently used programs are Tetris Max, Myst IV, Tomb Raider, and Quake.)
Bottom: Here's the Customize Start Menu dialog box.

When you click the Customize button, you see the dialog box shown at right in Figure 1-10.

Section 1.21.1.1: In the scrolling list

Here you're offered a random assortment of Start-menu tweaks, neatly listed in alphabetical order; they affect the Start menu in some fairly simple yet profound ways. Here, among other things, is where you'll find the show/hide switches for commands on the

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Chapter 2: Explorer, Windows, and the Taskbar

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Windows got its name from the rectangles on the screen—the windows—where every computer activity takes place. You look at a Web page in a window, type into a window, read email in a window, and look at lists of files in a window. But as you create more files, stash them in more folders, and open more programs, it's easy to wind up paralyzed before a screen awash with cluttered, overlapping rectangles.

Fortunately, Windows has always offered icons, buttons, and other inventions to help you keep these windows under control—and Windows Vista positively crawls with them.

There are two categories of windows in Windows:

• Explorer windows. Windows Explorer is Microsoft's name for the desktop world of folders and icons. It's the home-base program that greets you when you first turn on the PC. When you double-click a folder or disk icon on your desktop, what opens is an Explorer window. This is where you organize your files and programs.
• Application windows. These are the windows where you do your work—in Word or Internet Explorer, for example.

All of these windows have certain parts in common, but as Figure 2-1 shows, a lot has changed since the last version of Windows you probably used. If you're feeling disoriented, firmly grasp a nearby stationary object and read the following breakdown.

Figure 2-1: All windows have the same basic ingredients, making it easy to become an expert in window manipulation. This figure shows an Explorer (desktop) window—a disk or folder—but you'll encounter the same elements in application windows.

Here are the controls that appear on almost every window, whether in an application or Explorer:

• Title bar. It's really not much of a title bar anymore, since the window's title no longer appears here (Figure 2-1). But this big fat top strip is still a giant handle that you can use to drag a window around.
  If you double-click the title bar area, you maximize the window, making it expand to fill your entire screen exactly as though you had clicked the Maximize button described below. Double-click the title bar again to restore the window to its original size.

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Universal Window Controls: All Versions

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There are two categories of windows in Windows:

• Explorer windows. Windows Explorer is Microsoft's name for the desktop world of folders and icons. It's the home-base program that greets you when you first turn on the PC. When you double-click a folder or disk icon on your desktop, what opens is an Explorer window. This is where you organize your files and programs.
• Application windows. These are the windows where you do your work—in Word or Internet Explorer, for example.

All of these windows have certain parts in common, but as Figure 2-1 shows, a lot has changed since the last version of Windows you probably used. If you're feeling disoriented, firmly grasp a nearby stationary object and read the following breakdown.

Figure 2-1: All windows have the same basic ingredients, making it easy to become an expert in window manipulation. This figure shows an Explorer (desktop) window—a disk or folder—but you'll encounter the same elements in application windows.

Here are the controls that appear on almost every window, whether in an application or Explorer:

• Title bar. It's really not much of a title bar anymore, since the window's title no longer appears here (Figure 2-1). But this big fat top strip is still a giant handle that you can use to drag a window around.
  If you double-click the title bar area, you maximize the window, making it expand to fill your entire screen exactly as though you had clicked the Maximize button described below. Double-click the title bar again to restore the window to its original size.
• Window edges. Now they're fatter, making them easier to grab with your mouse. And on most computers, window edges are also transparent, revealing a slightly blurry image of what's underneath. (That's the Aero cosmetic overhaul at work; see Section 1.2.)
  Truth to tell, being able to see what's underneath the edges of your window (sort of) doesn't really offer any particular productivity advantage. Sure does look cool, though.
  In any case, you can change the size of a window by dragging any edge except the top. Position your cursor over any border until it turns into a double-headed arrow. Then drag inward or outward to reshape the window. (To resize a full-screen window, click the Restore Down button first.)

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Explorer Window Controls: All Versions

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When you're working at the desktop—that is, opening Explorer windows—you'll find a few additional controls dotting the edges. Again, they're quite a bit different from the controls of Windows XP and its predecessors.

In a Web browser, the Address bar is where you type the addresses of the Web sites you want to visit. In an Explorer window, the Address bar is more of a "breadcrumbs bar" (a shout out to Hansel and Gretel fans). That is, it now shows the path you've taken—folders you burrowed through—to arrive where you are now (Figure 2-2).

Figure 2-2: Top: The notation in the Address bar, Casey ▸ Pictures ▸ Halloween, indicates that you, Casey, opened your Personal folder (Section 1.17); then opened the Pictures folder inside; and finally opened the Halloween folder inside that.
Bottom: If you press Alt+D, the Address bar restores the slash notation of Windows versions gone by, so that you can type in a different address.

There are three especially cool things about the new Vista Address bar:

• It's much easier to read. Those ▸ little ▸ triangles are clearer separators of folder names than the older\slash\notation. And instead of drive letters like C:, you see the drive names.
  If the succession of nested folders' names is too long to fit the window, then a tiny << icon appears at the left end of the address. Click it to reveal a pop-up menu showing, from last to first, the other folders you've had to burrow through to get here.

  (The pop-up menu items that are supposed to be here—the list of recent places—appears in the same list, below a divider line.)
• It's clickable. You can click any breadcrumb to open the corresponding folder. For example, if you're viewing the Casey ▸ Pictures ▸ Halloween, you can click the word Pictures to backtrack to the Pictures folder.
• You can still edit it. The Address bar of old was still a powerful tool, because you could type in a folder address directly (using the slash notation).
  Actually, you still can. You can "open" the Address bar for editing in any of five different ways. (1) Press Alt+D. (2) Click the tiny icon to the left of the address. (3) Click any blank spot. (4) Right-click anywhere in the address; (5) From the shortcut menu, choose Edit Address.

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Optional Window Panes: All Versions

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Most Explorer windows have some basic informational stuff across the top: the Address bar and the task toolbar, at the very least.

But that's just the beginning. As shown in Figure 2-4, the Organize menu on the task toolbar lets you hide or show as many as four other strips of information. Turning them all on at once may make your windows feel a bit claustrophobic, but at least you'll know absolutely everything there is to know about your files and folders.

Figure 2-4: Windows Vista has you surrounded—or at least your Explorer windows.
Use the Organize menu to summon or dismiss each of the optional panes that can line a window. A subtle outline appears around the icon for each pane you've summoned. Choose the name of a pane once to make it appear, and a second time to hide it.

The trick is to choose a pane name from the Organize→Layout command, as shown in Figure 2-4. Here are the options you'll find there.

You can adjust the size of any pane by dragging the dividing line that separates it from the main window. (You'll know when you've got the right spot when your cursor turns into a double-headed arrow.)

As shown in Figure 2-1, the Search pane appears across the top of the window, just below the Address bar. Of course, the Search box already appears in every Explorer window, next to the Address bar—so why do you need a Search pane as well?

Because the pane gives you a lot more control. It lets you specify more elaborate search criteria, including where you want Windows to look. Details are on Section 3.3.1.

This strip appears at the bottom of the window, and it can be extremely useful. It reveals all kinds of information about whatever icon you've clicked in the main part of the window: its size, date, type, and so on.

It's the sort of information that, in previous versions of Windows, you wouldn't be able to see without right-clicking and opening the Properties window.

Some examples:

• For a music file, the Details pane reveals the song's duration, band and album names, genre, the star rating you've provided, and so on.
• For a disk icon, you get statistics about its formatting scheme, capacity, and how much of it is full.

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Tags, Metadata, and Properties: All Versions

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See all that information in the Details pane—Date, Size, Title, and so on? It's known by geeks as metadata (Greek for "data about data").

Oddly (and usefully) enough, you can actually edit some of this stuff. (See Figure 2-9.) For a document, for example, you can edit the Authors, Comments, Title, Categories, Status, and others. For an MP3 music file, the Artists, Albums, Genre, and Year can be changed. For a photo, you can edit the Date Taken, Title, and Author.

Figure 2-9: You can edit a lot of the background information that Windows stores about each icon on your PC. Click the information you want to change; if a text-editing box appears, you've hit pay dirt. Type away, and then press Enter (or click the Save button at the lower-right corner of the dialog box).

Some of the metadata is off limits. For example, you can't edit the Date Created or Date Modified info. (Sorry, defense attorneys of the world.) But you can edit the star ratings for music or pictures; in the row of five stars, click the rating star you want. Click the third star to give a song a 3, for example.

Most usefully of all, you can edit the Tags box for any kind of icon. A tag is just a keyword. It can be anything you want: McDuffy Proposal, Old Junk, Back Me Up—anything. Later, you'll be able to round up everything on your computer with a certain tag, all in a single window, even though they physically reside in different folders.

You'll encounter tags in plenty of other places in Vista—and in this book, especially when it comes to searching photos, and music.

Weirdly, you can't add tags or ratings to BMP, PNG, AVI, or MPG files.

Many of the boxes here offer autocompletion, meaning Vista proposes (in a pop-up menu) finishing a name or text tidbit for you if it recognizes what you've started to type.

You can tag a bunch of icons at once. Just highlight them all (Section 3.7) and then change the corresponding detail in the Details pane once. This is a great trick for applying a tag or star rating to a mass of files quickly.

The Details pane shows some of the most important details about a file. But believe it or not, Windows actually stores even

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Icon and List Views: All Versions

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