eSchool - Personal Technology, September 7th, 2007
Start by taking a look at the Windows Vista Start menu. Like the one in Windows XP, it has two columns, and the right column contains shortcuts to popular folders and features. The first thing you probably notice in the right column in Vista is that the names of most of those popular folders and features have changed.
The real difference in the Start menu, however, comes when you start looking for programs on it. At the bottom of the Start menu are some buttons:
· Standby: Puts the PC in low power mode and turns off most components; click the mouse or press a key to wake it up again.
· Lock: Locks the PC against unauthorized access; you must type your password to unlock it.
· Shut Down: Opens a menu with several shut down options, including Switch User, Logoff, Lock, Restart, Sleep, and Shut Down.
Also at the bottom of the Start menu is a Search bar. You can use this to search for a program if you don't know exactly where on the Start menu it's located. Suppose you want to use the Calculator, but you aren't sure where it is. You can begin typing calculator in the Search box, and the list of shortcuts narrows down to show only those that match.
For more complex search capabilities, click the Advanced Search button to open the Advanced Search pane at the top of the window. From here, you can specify criteria more precisely, such as limiting the search to certain file types or certain dates.
The Computer window (called My Computer in earlier versions) is a Windows Explorer interface that starts at the top level of your system's file hierarchy. The Computer window shows icons for each of the available drives, plus an icon for accessing shared folders and any Web sites you've set up (for example, via a Web editor such as Microsoft FrontPage).
One of the most significant changes in Windows Explorer under Vista is in the techniques used to move from location to location.
To move to a different location (for example, to open the contents of a drive, or to jump to one of the locations in the Favorite Links list or the Folders list), double-click where you want to go.
After you've moved to another location, a Back button (a left-pointing arrow) becomes available in the upper-left corner. After you've clicked it to go back to a previous location, a Forward button (a right-pointing arrow) becomes available. These work just like in a Web browser window, but they're for your local PC. You can also click the down arrow to go back more than one step at a time by selecting a menu option.
In Windows Explorer under Vista, a blue bar appears across the top, providing Organize and Views buttons. Each of these buttons opens a menu. (Other buttons are on this bar as well, but they vary depending on the location you're viewing.)
One of the improvements that Vista offers in file-handling is the ability to create different views of file listings, called virtual folders. A virtual folder shows content from multiple locations as if they were a single location (such as the results of a search operation) or shows the content from a location in a certain way (stacked, sorted, or grouped for example).
