Helpful Hints

Click very, very, lightly:
When clicking the mouse, use as light of a touch as possible. Since the mouse is electrical, not mechanical, a harder click does not produce better results. In fact, a harder click moves the entire mouse, rendering a single or double-click ineffective.

Pretend you are wearing a cast:
When moving the mouse, do not move your wrist. Pretend you have a cast on your arm so to move the mouse means moving your entire arm. Flexing the wrist causes the mouse to be pointed in the wrong direction. You always want the mouse cord pointed away from you and straight back from your hand.

Rest the wrist:
Use the table you are working on to rest your wrist. The more of your arm that can be on the table, the better off you will be. This will especially help when you start to click on objects. Resting your wrist gives you a good base so that the mouse doesn’t move when clicking.

Butt in the palm:
Put the butt of the mouse in the palm of your hand at all times. Try to do this whenever you are moving the mouse. Use the same grip whether you are moving the mouse or clicking. In other words, you shouldn’t have to move your hand to click the mouse. Rather, you should always have your hand in a position to click.

"Pet the dog" technique:
When you pet a dog you usually stop at the end of the dog, pick your hand up, move it to the top, and then stroke the dog again. When you run out of dog, you put your hand in a position to continue petting the dog. A similar step is used in moving the mouse.

When moving the mouse, you will often come into contact with the keyboard, run into the edge of the table, or extend your arm as far as it can go. When you encounter these situations, pick the mouse up and put your hand down in a position where you can continue moving in the direction that you wish to move. When the mouse is in the air the arrow on the screen will stay exactly where it is so that you can reposition the mouse without losing any ground.

You often see a number of items on the screen that you want to treat the same: you want to delete them all, drag them to a flash drive, etc. (This technique works best if you are viewing a list as in your email.)

1. Click an item once: item will turn blue (Highlight)

2. Hold down the Ctrl (control) key on the keyboard

3. Click on each item to select (as long as the Ctrl key is pressed, each item will Highlight)

4. Release the Ctrl key

5. Perform the action. For example, pressing the delete key on the keyboard will delete all of the highlighted documents. Dragging one will drag them all.

6. To Unselect, hold down Ctrl and click again on any highlighted item

1. Click the top most item once: item will turn blue (Highlight)
2. Hold down the Shift key on the keyboard
3. Click on the bottom most item to select: all of the items between the top and bottom items will Highlight
4. Release the Shift key

Or two clicks are NOT better than one because often the second click cancels the first one! (Try this on the Start button. One click opens the Start menu, a second [slow] click closes it.)

Sometimes if you click once, nothing happens. Sometimes if you click twice (clicking twice is called double click, a rapid tapping on the left mouse button), nothing seems to happen. So how do you know how many times to click?

You’re ready to “play” with your computer and you know that clicking on a picture on the screen will make something happen. But you also know that sometimes you have to click twice. What should you do?

Let’s start with the desktop (what you see when the computer is first turned on and warmed up). Every desktop has at least one icon (picture with words) called the Recycle Bin. If you move the pointer (a.k.a. cursor) onto the picture, the picture and words do not change. Some words might show up telling you what you’ve pointed to, but the icon itself remains the same. A single click will shade the entire icon. This shading is called highlight. It takes two clicks (double click) for an icon to be activated.

If you open a program such as Internet Explorer and move the pointer onto an object such as one of the three buttons in the upper right hand corner (the minimize, maximize/restore down and close squares), each time you point to one, it will light up or get a more pronounced look. This is also highlight. Now one click will activate the button.

So sometimes just putting the pointer onto an object on the screen makes it highlight, sometimes it doesn’t. Usually nothing happens if the object is an icon. If it’s a button, it highlights. Buttons occur in programs and in the dialog boxes you open when you want the computer to do something where you have choices. But you don’t have to know whether it is an icon or a button if you pay attention to highlighting.

There is a special kind of highlighting when the pointer itself changes: if it changes to a hand with an extended index finger (I call it “getting the finger” because it’s the point of the finger that counts), then you know that a single click will activate whatever it is pointing to. You see this most when you are on the internet because any time the pointer is on a link (a connection to another part of the internet) it changes to a pointing finger.

If you think like a computer, this all makes sense. The desktop is the place where all your computer work is placed, and sometimes it can pile up pretty deep! The pointer has to move over all of that and if it had to highlight every time it passed over an icon, it would have to keep track of a lot. And the icons can be moved around on the desktop, so it isn’t static like the buttons in a program or dialog box. So the computer uses icons when the objects can be moved around by you and buttons when they stay in the same place for an indefinite period of time.

The pointer turns to an “I bar” (looks like a capital I, called the insertion point) when there’s an area you can type in: a word processing program such as Word or your email, the address bar of your browser, a search bar on the internet. When you see it, nothing changes on the screen until you click. Then you get a blinking cursor to show you where you can type. Here are two tricks you might like. Place the I bar on a word and double click; the word highlights. Place the I bar on a word and triple click (yes, three times like Dorothy returning from Oz) and the entire paragraph will highlight.

To sum up, if the computer recognizes what you want (it highlights, gets underlined, the pointer turns to a finger), then you click once. If the computer doesn’t cause a change on the screen, you click once to make it recognize an item, twice to make it activate it.

Windows 7 is Microsoft’s latest version of an operating system (OS) for its type of computer, often called a PC (personal computer), and uses a graphical look called Windows. An OS is the rules required to run the computer. You can think of a computer as a black box; it isn’t until you turn it on that the computer becomes the type of computer it is meant to be. (Don’t confuse the OS with the brand name on the outside case.)

A lot of PC users now have the Windows Vista OS. (If you want to know what kind of system you have, watch the computer screen after you turn the computer on; at some point the name of the OS will be displayed.) Vista looks different from XP (its predecessor) and has “corrected” some of the not-so-friendly aspects of older Windows OS versions. The most notable is how you open up programs.

Microsoft has long been mocked for using a “Start” button because people who want to quit the computer have to go to the “Start” button to stop. It is located in the lower left corner of the screen and when the mouse is clicked on it, it opens up the start menu. On the XP screen, the start button is a green rectangle with the word “Start” on it. So if someone asks you to click on the start button, you move the mouse cursor (the arrow now called a pointer) onto the rectangle and click with the left mouse button. The start menu appears. On the Vista computer (and Windows 7) the start button is a round ball in the lower left corner (where you’re used to it) that will display the word “Start” if you let the pointer rest on it for a moment.

Once you click the “Start” button on a computer using the XP OS, you can open a program (say the game Solitaire). You move the pointer to “All Programs” and another menu pops open. Now you have to have some manual dexterity because the point of the arrow needs to be kept in the blue area surrounding the words “All Programs” or the menu you want to use may pop shut. Drat! You get to start over. The Vista OS “corrects” this by keeping the menus open for you and allowing you to click to make them appear (and disappear). (So those of you who double click all the time will be frustrated until you learn to click just once.) Since a lot of us clicked unnecessarily as we navigated the XP start menu anyway, this is no big change. What is great is not having to start over if the cat bumps your elbow while trying to navigate through the menus.

One of the “corrections” that Windows 7 has as compared to Vista is that when you want to turn the PC off, you now have a “Shut Down” button just like in XP! (You still have to open the “Start” menu, though.)

So, do you have to get Windows 7? That depends. Are you getting frustrated with your XP (or older OS) because it is really slow and all the maintenance of cleaning up the hard drive isn’t helping? Do you have a lot of pictures or videos and need more memory to store them? Are you a techno junkie and want the latest? These are all reasons to “upgrade.”

If you like your machine and don’t want to spend more money, then why bother? Notice I don’t mention Vista for upgrading. Windows 7 has a few features that would make your computer experience more enjoyable (the primary one being increased speed). But if you want to keep your machine and change the OS, you have to wipe out everything and start over. Sure, you can save all your “stuff,” but then you have to reload it. Techno geeks love doing this, so that might be a reason to go for Windows 7. (If you buy a new computer, you have to move all your data to the new computer, but you don’t have to reload all your programs and data as you do with changing the OS.)

If you’re buying a new computer anyway, then by all means go for the Windows 7 OS. The price is so right just now and you might as well have the latest. (Just don’t let your relatives get their hands on it. They’ll want to take it over.) Also, if you need help, there’s even a Windows 7 for Seniors for Dummies! And it looks like not too difficult a change from Vista, so friends might be able to help you.

For me and my two-year-old Vista OS, we’re waiting for something more spectacular or until the computer slows down below my slowing down reflexes.

The internet is made up of websites (locations on the internet) that are created to sell goods, promote opinions, provide knowledge, or to share personal information with friends and family. One of the most popular uses of the internet is to find information about almost any topic imaginable. So if you are interested in how much bottled water is really city tap water, you can use a search engine to help you find the information.

The most popular search engines are Google, Bing, and Yahoo. You go to their website by typing google.com or bing.com or yahoo.com into the address bar of your browser (the program you use to search the internet: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome). To compare the search engines, you can go to each in turn and type in your topic and see what happens.

So click in the address bar (the area at the top of your browser with “http” at the beginning of the white rectangle) and type in google.com and press Enter. (When I suggest pressing Enter, you can also click on various parts of the screen if you know where, but using the Enter key works and never moves around.) The Google home page opens with a plain white background and a search bar (plain white rectangle) across the middle. The blinking cursor shows you where you can type. As you begin to type, Google offers up various topics that begin with your spelling. In this case, once you type bottled, the third item is bottled water vs tap water, so you can stop typing and click on that choice. The result is a new page with a couple of sponsored links at the top (pink background on my computer, possibly blue on yours). Then there’s a list of the top 10 results. If you scroll down past these, there is a list of related searches that might be of even more interest. For advanced users, there’s searchewiki at the bottom that allows you to keep track of sites you like without losing them when you turn off your computer. However, you need to have a Google account, be signed in and know how to copy and paste URLs.

Click in the address bar and type in bing.com and press Enter. In Bing, you get a full page color photo and a prominent white search bar with a magnifying glass to identify it. You can move your cursor onto the page and little gray squares light up with different seasonally appropriate comments for your entertainment. Again, begin to type bottled, and Bing offers up various topics that begin with your spelling. Again the third item is bottled water vs tap water, so you click on that choice. Now the advertisement is in blue and the list follows. That ad is repeated at the bottom of the list, but there is no group of suggested related topics. With a different search, those suggestions might be in the left-hand column. Note there you get a list of your searches for today (or until you close your browser).

Click in the address bar and type in yahoo.com and press Enter. In Yahoo, you get a full page of ads/news/changeable content and a search bar at the very top. Again, you type bottled and the third item is bottled water vs tap water, so you click on it. Now the advertisements are in pink and the list follows with the ads repeated at the bottom of the list and one suggested related topic. Yahoo has items in a left-hand column as well, including a notepad you can use to record your impressions with your searches automatically added to your list. Be sure to copy this to a word processing program because it will disappear when you close your browser!

Google turned 11 in ’09, Bing was born in ’09, Yahoo has done searches since its founding in 1994, so it really is the oldest, but its searches were clumsy until about 2002. Now it uses Google to enhance its searches. I’ve tried to be impartial, but as a googler of many years, I prefer Google based in part on the quality of the searches returned.

So how does a search engine get all of this information to you almost before you finish typing? It creates indexes of website content. A “spider” program looks at web pages and records the words found on the site, creating an index for each word (leaving out non-content words like articles, prepositions and the like). So as you type, you are given a list of indexes to choose from. The search engine is now ready to give you the top websites on any of those topics.

Since search indexes are based on words, whichever search engine you use, space between words and leave out the “little words” and punctuation. The order of the words you type doesn’t really matter except if you don’t want to type too much. Try “water tap bottled” and you will have to type all the words. Your results will be much different, actually focusing on whether bottled water is really tap water, which is what you wanted to find out in the first place.

Beginners Typing

Exercise: (Beginning level) Open up a word processing program (Word Pad in your Accessories will do) or start a new email. You will see a blinking cursor (a straight line that blinks on and off). Type a sentence. Here’s a good practice one. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Repeat typing the sentence until it “wraps” down to the next line and keep typing to the end of the sentence. The blinking cursor moves ahead of your typing and continues to blink after what you typed.

Now look at your keyboard. On the right hand side of the alphabet section is the Enter key. Notice the arrow on it. It has a little tag at the end that goes down to a long arrow pointing left. Its job is to move the blinking cursor (see above) just like the arrow shows: down and all the way to the left.

1. Place your finger on the Enter key

2. Look at the blinking cursor on the screen

3. Tap the Enter key and watch the blinking cursor move down a line

4. Tap the Enter key again

You now have two blank lines after your typing. But suppose you don’t want those extra lines. (This can happen when the cat sits on your keyboard or you reach for the mouse and accidentally press the Enter key on the far right of your keyboard in the numbers section.) You can erase those extra “Enters” using the Backspace key.

The Backspace key is located in the upper right hand corner of the alphabet section of your keyboard. Its job is to remove whatever is just to the left of the blinking cursor.

1. Place your finger on the Backspace key

2. Look at the blinking cursor

3. Tap the Backspace key and watch the blinking cursor move UP a line!

4. Tap the Backspace key again

5. Your blinking cursor is back at the end of your typing.

6. Now press Enter to start a new paragraph (For the computer, the job of the Enter key is to mark the end/beginning of a paragraph.)

7. Continue typing until you have another paragraph

Are you ready for this? Remember the brown fox that jumped over the lazy dog? Well, it really was a purple pig in disguise and it jumped over a sleeping cat!

So let’s fix this. No, you don’t have to erase everything you just wrote. See the arrow keys in a cluster at the bottom of your keyboard? Their job is to move the blinking cursor in the direction the arrow points (Up, Down, Right, Left).

1. Tap the Up arrow a few times until the blinking cursor is in the line with one of the foxes. Place the blinking cursor on the right side of brown fox by tapping the Right and/or Left arrows as needed: brown fox|

2. Now tap the Backspace 9 times to erase that brown fox

3. Type purple pig

4. Presto changeo, you have that purple pig!

5. Repeat to change lazy dog to sleeping cat

6. Go to the end of your typing by holding down the Down arrow and then the Right arrow until they don’t do anything.

This last trick works because the blinking cursor can’t go where it’s never been before.

Challenge: Type a paragraph at the beginning of your typing. (Answer next month.)

Happy typing!

Term of the Month: CPU (pronounced as the individual letters)

Did you know that the CPU is the brain of the computer? The letters stand for Central Processing Unit. What it does is to follow the directions given to it by you and by the programs you use to do whatever on the computer. Yes, I know you do a lot of solitaire (so do I!). Solitaire is an example of a computer program. So is the word processing program you used to type the exercise above.

A computer program is a set of step-by-step instructions that allows you to interact with the computer to accomplish a given task. The CPU coordinates the actions you do with the keyboard and the mouse with the requirements of the program and changes what you see on the screen accordingly.

Think of all the work the CPU does when you look up something on the internet. You type a word in the search bar on the screen (for example, CPU) and press the enter key. The CPU gathers the letters together, packages them as a message to a computer on the internet that uses its CPU to locate the information, that CPU then packages it up for you, and sends it back to your CPU. Your CPU then does all the work of giving out the instructions to draw the information onto your computer screen.

Here is an internet link you might want to use to see a demonstration of the insides of a computer including the CPU. (You might not believe how small a CPU can be!) http://computer.howstuffworks.com/microprocessor.htm

Here are some general sources for more information about computers: webopedia.com, wikipedia.org

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