2 the Monitor / Screen

The monitor is the viewing part of your computer – feel free to use the buttons on the screen itself to adjust your overall image, to get it perfectly right for you. You may also want to think about the angle at which the monitor sits, and adjust this angle until, again, it is right for you when you’re sitting comfortably in front of the keyboard.

What is displayed on the monitor, when you first start it up, is a number of ‘pages’ where you may see logos – your computer brand, the Windows brand, and so forth. It finally stops on a page called the ‘desktop’. This page is the main page, from which you will use the mouse (see article on ‘The Mouse’) to indicate what you want to do. The more software packages you load onto your computer, the more ‘icons’ appear on the left of your screen. You can double click (on your left mouse button) to access these at any time. In the bottom left of your screen, you’ll see your ‘start’ button. A single click on this (left mouse button) will bring up a menu of different options; again, use your mouse to highlight, then the left mouse button to indicate your choice. This box which appears from underneath an option, is called a ‘Drop Down Box.’

Once you have clicked on an option, your computer will process your command. Sometimes this will be very fast, at other times this process may take a while – it all depends on the complexity of the action you have asked the computer to do. You can often track the progress of the computer by looking at the bottom of the screen. Often, for longer tasks, the computer will display a ‘progress meter’ which appears as a rectangle. The rectangle slowly fills, from left to right, in green. When full, the computer has finished processing your command and you will be taken to the screen / window you wanted. How quickly the rectangle fills depends entirely on the complexity of the task. Easy tasks, it fills quickly. Difficult tasks take longer. If the ‘progress meter’ stops for a very long period of time, it may be that your computer has frozen and you will need to use the ESC key or even the CTRL-ALT-DEL function to restore your computer to working condition again.