So you just rushed out to your local Best Buy and purchased a brand new computer. The sales person rattled off some specs - 200 gig hard drive, 4 gigs of RAM, DVD +- Writer, CD Writer, media card slots, 4 USB ports, blah…blah…blah. You think to yourself, "All I want to do is go on the Internet and check my email. All this computer mumbo jumbo is like trying to crack the Da Vinci Code. If I just described your experience with a computer, fasten your seat belts ladies and gentleman, a quick tour will have you surfing websites and doing thing with the computer you never thought you could.



First up, if you bought your computer from a leading retailer and a major brand name like HP or Compaq, it came with a quick start guide to get you up and running in a hurry. That is a good place to start. Here you can review set-up instructions and precautions. Primary among these is the location of the ON/OFF buttons, special function keys often denoted by F1 to F12 as well as functions specific to your particular machine.

Often a computer purchased at a major retail outlet comes preloaded with software - some important and some unimportant. But it is principally significant and critical to install a good anti-virus and anti-spyware program before venturing online. You can purchase a piece of software for this like Norton Anti-virus by Symantec. This is probably the best-known anti-virus software. Although it is an excellent product, I recommend AVG by Grisoft software. It does a comparable job and they have a free version. Just go over to a friend's house and to a Google search for the key phase "Download AVG Free" and you will easily find the link.

I also recommend going over to a friend's house before you go online and downloading (or having them download for you) and putting the files on a write able CD or DVD. That way you can take these files back to your computer on CD and install them on your computer before you go online. I wish to recommend these free, but extremely valuable programs. "Spybot Search and Destroy", "Spyware Terminator", and "Ad-Aware" by a company called Lava soft. These programs are free, but they are extremely critical because they help keep your computer free from malicious spyware and adware that can not only slow down your system, but also harm your computer and the information and software you put on it.

This brings me to another critical point. If you can, set up a second account "a limited user account" and whenever you can start up your computer under this account. That way if a malicious program does try to install itself or start up, it cannot because a limited user account denies it the privilege to do so. In Windows XP for example, you can do this by clicking the START button in the lower left of the screen and going to "Control Panel. Once there, you can click on the "Accounts" Icon and go through the steps to set-up a limited user account.

It is also important for a new user to realize that regular upkeep and maintenance of your computer is essential for proper operation. A couple of very basic things include disk defragmentiom, disk cleanup, and setting restore points. Over time your computers main storage area, the hard drive can become cluttered from adding and deleting programs. Disk defragmentation orders and restores the files to there proper places. You can find this by going to the START button, then Programs, then Accessories. Under "Accessories" is the subcategory "System Tools". The "Disk Defragment program can be run from there.

"Disk cleanup" also found in the "System Tools" folder (START, Programs, Accessories, System Tools) gets rid of unnecessary files that may be slowing down your computer.

Also, you should make sure that the Windows firewall and Automatic Updates are enabled. This helps to prevent unauthorized access to your computer and allows Microsoft to send you important security updates to their operating system. Typically XP or Vista as of this writing. You can make sure these are enabled by going to START, Control Panel and clicking on the security tab. Make sure the option to download updates automatically is selected and that the "Windows Firewall" is turned ON.

Also, you should be aware that you can download a lot of useful and totally free programs online. One place to find these is Sorceforge.org and another thing you can do is do a Google search with the key phrase "Download Open Source Programs". Open Source are programs with a free licence that are contributed to by a specific community of online users and made available for free.

Another important thing to note is that a program you install on your computer is an executable file, that it has an .exe on the end of its name. The easiest way to run and install programs is to click on the START button and click on RUN to bring up the RUN dialogue box. From here you can locate the file you want to install (as long as you made note of the location were you saved it.

Another option is often when you download a file you are provided with tree options- RUN, SAVE, or CANCEL. If you choose RUN. The program will download and begin the installation process for you. Also be aware that dome programs you download from the Internet are compressed or zipped. Before you can install these, you must download and unzip them to another folder of your choice. A lot of people recommend Winzip for this purpose/ you can find this at Winzip.com, but I recommend "Ultimate Zip" because it opens a wide variety of compressed files, not just zipped files. You can again do a Google search with the key phrase "Download Ultimate Zip" and you will easily find the program.

I need to continue this in another article because of space limitations. Please look for more where you found this article.