NOTES FOR THE MEETING ON 6th April
HELP!!!!
We will be looking in some detail at the Windows help system, and how to obtain help when you need it. The answer to your problem is often buried deep in the Help window, if only you can find it. A very good explanation of how the system works is given on pages 44 to 47 or Moira Stephen's book. I only want to add a couple of things.
Firstly, a very easy way of accessing the help system for any application is (usually) by pressing F1. "F1 for help" is a Windows cliche. Secondly, what Moira doesn't mention is that when using the "Find" function (page 46) for the first time with any new help file, the system will build a database first, and you will be offered the choice of which type of database to build. The default selection of Minimal is usually good enough.
ACCESSORIES.
We will be looking at a few of the Accessories that come bundled with Windows - games, a calculator, Paint and Wordpad. We will be covering Wordpad in some depth later, when we take a very basic look at word processing. Again, what Moira doesn't make clear is that many accessories are not installed by default, and that you need to install them specially. I will be showing you how to do this. You need to access Add and Remove Software in the Control Panel, select "Add or remove Windows Components", check the items you want added, and install. You'll need your Windows Installation CD for this.
We will be looking in detail at the display options in the control panel, and will be going into greater depth than is covered in the book. In particular, we will be looking at screen resolution and refresh rate, so let's have some definitions.
For those of you who don't yet have the text book, I will bring a few photocopies.
See you Saturday!
Just to remind you,
The formal meetings are on the 1st and 3rd Saturdays of the months; the informal ones on the 2nd and 4th. Due to the number of people attending, I don't have time to deal with specific problems at formal meetings; these are best aired at the informal ones.
If you have any problems or suggestions, please e-mail them to me at questions@billnot.com before the meeting if possible, so that I can think about them!