Simple Guide to the Personal Computer

Contenuto dell'eBook:

"This guide to the personal computer is aimed at helping complete beginners to computers to start to understand them. It starts with very simple steps to guide readers into the parts that make up a personal computer. It looks at how the parts are wired together and which ones need to be connected to an electrical supply. It also shows how to switch the machine on.

It goes on to look at how these parts work together to run application programs. It guides them through the very basic level of how the user and the computer interact, to help people to learn how to use a personal computer. It tries to do this in a very simple step by step way that helps to build up confidence in using a computer.

A little while ago I was teaching a lady about how to use a computer, and she said that she had bought the “Which Guide” to computers but found that it was too complicated to understand the guide! My Mum used to say that when anyone is telling her about how to use the computer she waits to hear the words “You just…” and then she knows that the explanation will go straight over her head.

Well computers are complicated and technical pieces of equipment. They can be very powerful and can do a lot of different things. They have developed and changed from something used by highly technical specialists into devices that are commonplace and owned by people who are not technically minded.

I have written this guide to try to help people to get to grips with the Personal Computer. I started writing it as a teaching manual to teach people a basic understanding of the computer and what it is and what it does. I decided to publish it as an E-book to try to assist people in learning about the personal computer.

Now when people come new to the personal computer they are often afraid that they will do something that will damage the computer. It is an understandable fear. However it is quite unlikely that you will be able to do much damage to the computer accidentally, (short of hitting it with a hard object like a hammer!)

In the past the computers themselves didn’t help to reduce this fear by giving some rather misleading error messages. One that used to appear was “Fatal Error”. That’s when you might duck under the desk and hope the computer doesn’t have a gun! It just means that the application program that has been running has gone wrong somewhere and the computer can’t put it right without starting it again. It sounds much more dramatic than it actually is.

Another problem that people find is that they have done something on the computer and the work that they have done just suddenly disappears off the screen. This can be very disconcerting as people often fear that the work has vanished and can’t be found again. This problem is one which is mainly caused by not having a good understanding of the computer screen and the interaction that people have with the computer through the screen.

Still another problem is when people have asked me to sort out their computers because the printer doesn’t work anymore. Often this is not actually a problem with the printer itself, but a problem between the computer and the printer which stops the printer working. With the information given here I hope to show how the computer and the printer communicate with each other, and why this sometimes goes wrong.

Once you have worked through this guide I trust that this kind of problem will be solved for you.

This guide was written for Windows computers, because they are the most common ones that people use. The internals are the same for any kind of computer, but even those are changing at a rapid rate.

I suggest working through the book from the start to the finish to get the best use out of the book. After that I hope that it will be useful as a reference guide. I intend to write some further books to look at common things that people want to do with computers and common application programs." (Timothy Dale)

Per maggiori informazioni: il volume "Simple Guide to the Personal Computer" di Timothy Dale, edito da Dale Computer Services, è in vendita in formato Kindle su Amazon.it al prezzo di Euro 3,12.