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Welcome to the course on Computer Programming.

In
this session we will see how best can we use our
computer. So, lets turn on i.e. switch on our computer.
Some people may also call as 'Boot' the computer.
Please note that there will be a similar setup at your
end, but not exact. The setup will vary depending on
the model of your monitor, CPU, printer, etc.. We will
first switch on the main switch, which connects to the
spike guard. Our spike guard is providing power to
monitor, CPU, printer, etc.. We will now turn on our
monitor. We can see this blue light. We now press the
round button of our CPU. Oh, we can feel the
vibration on the CPU cabinet and can also see some
text on the monitor.

...........Some commentry while the computer starts

Now, imagine that there are 4 families staying in a


building, each residing in different houses. Every
family has a key to access their respective houses. A
family cannot enter some other family's house with
his/her own house key. Similarly there are 4 users i.e.
families of this computer, each having a key i.e. a
password to access it. Since, we do not like to share
our house key with any one else, similarly, we should
also make practice of not sharing the password with
anyone nor even writing it down. Now, I will enter
password, and press enter. I have now got access to
my computer i.e. my home. This screen is known as
your desktop. Desktop is nothing but the screen that is
visible when the computer starts. The desktop screen
can be imagined as a 'Hall' or a 'Living room' of a
house.

Now let us move on to create some folders. But,


before going ahead, let us go outside to one of our
rooms. My God, this room is messed up with files all
over. Well, let me see what are these files. This is the
electricity file having some record of the bills, this is
the mathematics file containing some material related
to it. similarly I see some other files too. Since they
are scattered all over, let me just stack them up.

Now suppose, if after a few days,


someone would ask me for my
electricity bill, I would have to
search through all these files.
These files will increase day by
day, and at one point, I will not be
able to locate any material which I
may need. Now, let us go to the
other part of our room.
This part indeed is quite neat and tidy having boxes.
Boxes can be imagined a folder. Every folder is well
named and contains respective files. The 'Mathematics
folder contains files related to mathematics only,
electricity folder contains files pertaining to electricity
only, and so on.

As we all expect our house to be well orgainzed, we


should follow the same rules to organize materials in
our computer too. Now, let us go back to our
computer and get started.

Let us now create a folder. Click the Right button on


the mouse. We can also say 'right click' your mouse.
Move your mouse to the text 'create new folder'. This
has got highlighted, and now click the left button of
the mouse over this text. Henceforth, if we want to
click the left button of the mouse, we will say 'Click'.
As you can see a folder is created with the title
'untitled folder'. The computer now wants to know the
name of the folder. So let us write 'Subjects' and press
enter on the keyboard. As you can see the folder is
named and is still highlighted. Move your mouse
away from the folder Click any where on the desktop.
Now, the folder is not highlighted. Now, let us 'double
click', i.e. press the left button of the mouse two times,
but the action of clicking should be fast. We are now
in the 'Subjects' folder. Now, let us create another
folder in this one. Right click and click create new
folder. Let us name to 'Science'. Let us create another
folder called 'Maths'. Now, let us rename the 'Science'
folder to 'History'. Right click on the folder, and click
'Rename...'. Now will write 'History' and press enter.
The folder has been renamed. As you can also see that
now the 'History' folder appears before the 'Science'
folder. All the folders and files are arranged in
alphabetical order. The current style of displaying is of
'icon' type. We can change this view. Click 'View',
move your mouse to 'list', and click on 'list'. We can
now see a different style of viewing the contents. Let
us change it to another style. Click 'View', click
'Compact'. Let us now revert back to the inital one.
Click 'View', click 'Icons'. Now let us delete the folder
Maths. Click on the maths folder, and press the delete
key on your keyboard. We can see that only one folder
is present. Let us close this folder. We move our
mouse to the leftmost top of our screen. We can see a
red cross. Click on the cross. We are now back to our
desktop, i.e. the living room of our house.

As a good practice, we generally do not keep all the


furniture in the living room. We distribute it to other
rooms like kitchen, bedroom, studyroom, etc.
Similarly, we should not have everyting on the
desktop. So, let us browse the 'Home' folder. This is
the left pane. Click the 'Home' folder. We now see
some folders and files which are already present. Most
of our content should be in this 'Home' folder, under
respective folders. The content on the desktop should
be selective. Let us close the home folder.

Now, let us see the different softwares i.e. applications


which are already installed. Click 'Dash Home' icon.
We can see some applications which have been used
recently. We can start typing to search them. Let us
select 'Gedit'. Gedit is a software that lets us create
text files. i.e. files with .txt extention. Write 'Gedit'
and press enter. We can see that a new window has
opened up. We now need to save this file. Let us click
'File' and 'Save As'. A new window appears that
prompts us as to where the file should be saved.
Currently let us save it on our Desktop. In this area,
we need to write the file name of our file. Let us write
'MyFirstFile.txt', and click 'Save'. We can now see the
title of our file over here. Let us start typing on the
screen. Hello, I am Firuza Aibara, taking a lecture on
getting started with computers. Since we have
modifed this file, we should save it, so that it remains
up to date. Click 'File' and 'Save'. Whenever we need
to save existing files, we should click 'Save' and not
'Save As'. If we want to save an existing file with a
different file name, only then we need to Click 'Save
As'. I can also do some more operations like cut, copy,
paste, search, replace, print the file, etc.. We will now
close this file.

Now, let us browse some existing files on our


computer. Let us double click on this folder which
contains some material related to this course. We can
see some pdf files, images, and program files. Let us
open the .pdf file by double clicking on it. We will
browse it by pressing the down arrow key on the
keyboard or by scrolling using a mouse. Let us close it
by moving to the top left of the screen and clicking
the cross button. Let us double click on the image to
view it. Now we will close this image and view the
program. Let me first right click on the program. By
default, the program will open in Gedit. If we want to
open it using other software, we can do by clicking
'Open with', and clicking on the software.

There might be some situations where we have saved


the file and closed it, but do not remember where we
had actually saved. In most of the applications, for
example gedit, it will show the recent files that we
have created.

Now consider that we want to mail this folder to a


friend of ours. Since there are many files, it is a bit
tedious to include these files one by one. Instead we
can compress them into a single file, which will also
reduce the size of the file. Right click on the folder,
click 'Compress', select the type of file, and click
create. The compressed file is created on the desktop.
The process of uncompressing is almost similar, right
click on the compressed file, click extract here.

With this we come close to the end of our session.


Whenever we go outside our house, we generally
switch of the lights, fans, etc, and then lock our house.
Similarly, we should always lock our computer if
unattended or switch it off if we are not going to use
for a long time. Let us shut down our system.

With this we conclude our lecture and I hope that the


participants who are new to computers will benefit
from this lecture.

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