Welcome to another great show right here on ITProTV. You're watching the Comptia IT Fundamentals for Exam FC0-U61. I'm your host, Ronnie Wong, and today we're diving into the realm of Microsoft Windows. And here, of course, to help us, with me, our IT expert, himself, Mr. Don Pezet. Don, welcome back to our show. And thanks for having me back, Ronnie, and yeah, like you said, we're gonna take a look at Microsoft Windows in this episode. If you've been watching the whole series we actually just finished a show on operating systems and we stayed fairly general. And we tried to talk about operating systems just as a generic type entity. But in this episode we're gonna dump all that generic stuff and focus right in on Microsoft Windows, which is the most popular operating system in the world. It is used by the bulk of business users and by most home users as well. So the odds are if you're watching this show, you're probably watching from a machine running Microsoft Windows already. And if you're super familiar with it, great. But if you're not, this will be a chance for us to jump in and take a look at those features, how it functions, what it does. And what it is that kind of sets Windows apart from the other operating systems. Now we are gonna follow with more episodes on macOS and Linux as well. But in this episode we're gonna take a grand tour through the world of Microsoft Windows. All right, Don, so everybody wants to know this as we get started into our IT career, why in the world is Microsoft Windows going to be the popular one? So just share a little of history of how it got here a little bit and help us to get started. Sure, Windows has been around a long time and in fact it really wasn't the original operating system for Microsoft. The original operating system was called DOS, the Disk Operating System. And DOS was a command-line based operating system that was designed to run on some of the old IBM PC's. And one of the things that made DOS so popular was that they didn't really care what hardware you ran it on, they supported a number of processors. So you could buy a computer and you could buy DOS and throw it on there. But DOS was just command line based. You just got a black screen with a command prompt and that was it. You could run one program at a time, and if you wanted to run a second program, you had to close the first one and then open the second one. This is back in the floppy disk days. Computers were not very powerful back then, so you had pretty limited functionality. Well over the years computers have become far more advanced. Hardware has become much faster. And operating systems have developed quite a bit. In the 80's Microsoft worked with IBM, Microsoft and IBM were teamed up, and they were working on an operating system called OS2. And OS2, had a graphical user interface they were working on. Now the IBM and Microsoft partnership didn't last, it kind of split off. But Microsoft took the parts they were working on, and that became Microsoft Windows. Microsoft Windows was a graphical user interface that laid right on top of DOS. And that is what became the Windows that we run today. And now you can't go and buy DOS by itself, you buy Windows, and the old DOS system is actually just kind of a part. And I have to say kind of, because it's not actually DOS anymore, it's evolved so, so much. So when I go into a computer that's running Windows. If we look at my computer this is what I see. I see a graphical user interface, I see icons. This is what came out of Microsoft's work with IBM and has now evolved a whole new beast just over the years. But the olden days are still there, that if I really wanted to I can fire up command prompt and I can see what is effectively the old DOS. The old DOS type environment, where I get a command prompt and I can type commands, and I can start to do work or whatever it is I'm going to do. This is what life was like back in the 1980s, right? Well, now we're in, it's almost 2020 right? So, time is flying by really fast. And we don't work in command line environments like this anymore. So, the name Windows came from the idea of the graphical user interface. See how this command prompt is in a square, and I can move it around like this. In fact, I can stick it over here on the side. I can launch a web browser, it's in its own little square. And I can kinda park it over the side. These are supposed to be like windows on a house. When you look at the front of a house it's one big house but there is always different windows on it, right? And if I look in one window I see the living room, and if I look in another window I see the kitchen, if I look in a third window they call the police. So, it's kind of giving me these different views in that operating system. And more importantly, I'm running more than one program at the same time. I've got my web browser. I've got this command prompt. I've got where I'm browsing my file system. And I can do all these simultaneously. This is called multitasking. Microsoft Windows is a multitasking operating system. It's allowing the computer to do more than one thing at a time. I didn't have to close my web browser so that I could open a command prompt. I don't have to limit myself. In fact, even inside of one program I can do multiple things like, I might choose to browse several different sites. I might want, I need my news, right? So I'm gonna pull up cnn.com. And then I can pull up foxnews.com, and we can see how different they are. And you know, we can start to do all of these different things. Now, I'm not having to close out one program to go for another. I can do it all right here inside of one system. So that's part of the way that Microsoft Windows functions. It is heavily reliant on the graphical user interface. When you install Windows, it installs with a GUI, when you buy that laptop, or that desktop. And most people have adjusted to this system, they've learned it, they're used to it. And so, part of the reason why Windows is so popular is because it's just been around so long. Now, another reason why it's so popular, is that you can buy Microsoft Windows by itself. If I go to a computer, a company that sells software, like Best Buy, right? So if I just go to BestBuy.com. And I guess I have to spell it right or it doesn't function. But if I go to bestbuy.com and I wanna buy a copy of Microsoft Windows I can come in here and do a search for Microsoft Windows. If I get past their survey. Right there, buy a copy of Microsoft Windows 10 Home Edition for $100. I could buy my own hardware, whatever I wanted as long as it's compatible hardware, then I could install Windows on it. So they give me the flexibility of picking the hardware that I want. Other vendors don't do that. For example, Apple. If I wanted to buy Apple's macOS, if I come in here and search for Apple macOS I'm not gonna find just the software. Apple doesn't sell it that way. If you want macOS, you have to buy their hardware. And their hardware comes with macOS on it, right? That limits a company. That limits an organization. If I want a computer and I want macOS, I have to buy an Apple Mac. I have to, that's the only way to get it. But if I want Microsoft Windows, I can buy hardware from Dell, HP, Acer, Lenovo, LG, Sony, any number of companies. They all make computers that run Microsoft Windows. And that flexibility for us to basically pick our hardware and remain flexible like that makes Windows very popular and very common. And so when you get into the business world, businesses like to be able to negotiate out bulk pricing agreements and purchase computers at a lower price. And they can do that with generic hardware that they can't do with Apple. So that's why we see Microsoft Windows so well accepted. And for software developers when they write a program, they're gonna write a program for the most popular operating system first. And so we're in this kind of this habit where software developers will develop for Windows first. And then they'll evaluate and say, maybe I'll release this for Mac OS also and kind of add it in afterwards. But for most businesses, the software they run requires Microsoft Windows and that's why we see it as popular as it is. All right Don, so speaking of this idea of what you're talking about where we have these different icons and we can point and click on things. What are some of the other features we need to know about in terms of just us interacting with the operation system? Well, at the heart of an operating system there's something called a kernel. The kernel is an application, a very small application. It's the very first program that runs when the operating system is launched and it's what's actually making the operating system drive. It's what's doing the real work. But that kernel, we don't see it as a person because it's all hidden behind this user interface, right? So the user interface is how we're interacting with that kernel and the UI in Microsoft Windows is called Explorer. Now don't confuse that with the web browser, Microsoft has a web browser called Internet Explorer. Well, actually has two web browsers, right? They have Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer, all right those are their two browsers. Well, Internet Explorer hasn't always been around, but ever since the first version of Windows, we've had the explorer type, well, actually that's not even true. Cuz in the beginning it was one called Presentation Manager that then changed and became Explorer in Windows 95. So starting Windows 95 we had Explorer. And the Explorer interface is designed to make it easy for you to access things on your system. So when I look at my screen, I'm looking at Explorer, not Internet Explorer, just plain old Explorer. And it's giving me a couple of pieces that are really useful. First, icons on my desktop, right? The things that run constantly and frequency I can put icons on the desktop. And I see an icon right here for Microsoft Edge, so I can launch that if I need it, and then I'll have it available to me, right? I can put other icons or documents, papers that I'm working on, spreadsheets, I can put them on my desktop. This is designed to replicate your actual physical desk and how you might have papers that you are working on laying there. Now, they'd be laying right here. Then, I have my taskbar down here at the bottom. And the taskbar is how we run most programs or how we access other areas of the system. You'll see a Start button on the left side, and the Start button, if I click that it brings up a Start menu. Now, your Start menu might look different than mine. Mine is a clean install, so there's not much going on here. On a newer install, a lot of times you'll see additional buttons and icons over here on the side for some of their active applications. You'll see all sorts of things, like news blurbs and other software. I've removed that from mine, but otherwise you'll see a list of all the programs on your system. You can launch them and get an access. You've also got a search functionality right here that you can type in and do a search. You can search for applications, you can search for documents, you can even search the web. If I wanna find out how that NHL draft went, I can come in and just type NHL draft and here we go. It reached out it finds the information, I can see the NHL draft, right, so that's all being pulled. Not from my computer that's coming from the Internet now. That search is very dynamic. In Microsoft Windows, that search is powered by a system called Cortana. Cortana is designed to be easy to use. It's designed to help you find information on your system as well as find information on the Internet, and is designed to be interacted with via voice. So notice this little microphone icon right there? But I could hit that and I could ask Cortana to do things. Now I haven't done the voice programming on mine cuz it needs to be trained to your voice. That and I kinda hate talking to computers. [LAUGH] It's a pet peeve of mine. So I'll tell it that, I'm not gonna do that. But anyhow, so we can configure that, get it set up and communicate. We can also browse our file system. This is probably the number one task of most operating systems, it's they need to give you access to your files. So, every operating system has some kind of file system browser. And in Explorer, let me just show you here if I flow my mouse over this folder icon, you'll see it's called File Explorer, right? This Explorer term is kind of spread all through Windows and if I launch that I'll see my file system. It starts by showing me my frequent stuff, files and folders that I've used recently. But on the left here, I can go to this PC and I can browse to my hard drive, here's my C drive. And I can browse and start accessing files there, I can go to my own documents folder, and I can see documents that I've got. And I can open those documents. Now there's another thing that an operating system does. It says, if you wanna open up a program, that's great, right? You just run the program, I can double click on Edge and it'll launch it. But here I've got a document, I've got a resume, right? If I wanna open this resume, the resume is a document, I need a program to open it. Well, the operating system will try and keep track of what programs can be used to open what documents. So all I have to do is double click on this resume and it'll open up in a word processor, in this case it's using Microsoft WordPad. So it's launching here and now I can come in and see what we've got and other information here. I didn't have to realize what program it was, it took care of that for me. Operating systems are trying to make things easier, in this case Explorer does a fine job of that. Now when we're browsing through here, a lot of what's going on behind the scenes is hidden from us because it's super complex, right? So for example, I'm browsing my file system. The file system here is storing 1s and 0s, data bits on a hard drive and how did it find that data? How did it figure out where it was and all that good stuff? Well, there's actually a whole file system that's a part of Windows called NTFS, that's the New Technology File System. And NTFS is keeping track of where my files are and what permissions are on them. But I don't see any of that from here. In fact I, have to dig a good bit to find it. If I right click on This PC and I choose Manage, it's gonna bring up a Computer Management screen. And in here I can go to Disk Management and I'll see my disks and I can learn a little bit more about them. So, I see my C drive here and up top, I can see that my C drive has the NTFS file system on it. And NTFS is what's giving me the ability to locate these files quickly, store them in a way that we know it will maintain integrity, so the files don't degrade over time. If I put a file there today it'll be the same exact file a year from now or five years from now, unless I choose to modify it. But it also gives us advanced functions, like I can do encryption and compression. If I take that resume and I pull up its properties, inside of the properties for that, I can go to Advanced. And right here, you see, I can turn on compression and encryption. I say and, I think you can only do one or the other. Let's do, yeah, it won't let you do both. But I can choose to encrypt it or to compress it, and that's all being done by the file system. When I compress it, the file's gonna get smaller on the disk, it'll take less room. But I don't see that, as the user I just see that icon and I click on it and it opens and there's my resume. I have no idea that it was compressed,right? That's what operating systems do, they hide complexity. NTFS and Explorer and the Microsoft Windows kernel, they all had to know about that encryption or compression, I didn't. It just took care of it and I give it the information and there it is. All right so Don, you were talking about this idea when you showed us in disk management it said C colon and then a backslash I believe is what it said. Is there reason why C and do all those other characters mean anything? Sure, you might have more than one drive on your system. When you buy a computer a lot of times they just have one hard drive, right? My laptop has one hard drive and so Microsoft gives them a drive letter so that you know how to access it, right? A through Z, 26 letters, very few people have more then 26 drives, most people have 1, so 26 is more than enough. so you can browse and access the disk. Now it is a little weird that it starts a C, that like C drive, what happened to A and B. Well, in the olden days we had floppy disks and most systems in the early days only had one disk and that was your A drive. But there was a period of time where you had five and a quarter inch, and three and a half inch drives and a lot of computers started having two drives, and that was A and B. So with hard drives what we have today those started with C. Just that a little bit of history that's there, but as you add more drives there'll be D and E, and F. A and B are largely unused these days, but you could in theory change the drive letter and switch to A if you wanted it's best to leave it at C, cuz that's kind of the default of most computer systems. Microsoft is the only operating system that uses drive loaders to reference a disk. When we do Linux and MacOS in our other shows, you'll see that they use different ways of referencing the disks. But yeah, that's where that drive loader comes from. And you don't even really see it anymore, because they give you this quick access to jump right to your folders. You have to go to this PC before you even start to see the drive letters. So I've got my hard drive as C. I've got a DVD drive here that's D. That's not D for DVD, it's just, that's the next letter after C. So that's why it's showing up there. All right, so Don, as we start taking a look, it looks like that there's some general functionality built into the operating system itself. But what if I needed something a little bit more directed at what we needed? How do I get an application onto the system itself? All right, that's another key piece of Microsoft Windows is that the operating system has some good software built into it, but it's not the greatest. Usually we're gonna have software we want. There's things that I want to do. So for example I use a text editor called Sublime Text. There's text editing built right into Windows, right? It comes with Notepad, so I could come in here and launch Notepad and I could start writing text and there we go, it works, right? But I have certain search and replace, irregular expressions, and other crazy things that I like to use the Notepad doesn't do. It gives me the basis, like the what's it, lowest common denominator of them. The minimum amount of any activity that any average user would need. That's what it gives me. They actually give me another one if we use Wordpad instead. It's a little more advanced, right? You can do fonts and formatting and a little bit more fancy. But it still doesn't have some of the features that I want. So what I can do is I can go out to the Internet or whatever and I can find a text editor that meets my needs. And I can download it and install it on top of Windows. Windows gives us the ability to install software and uninstall software. So if I were to browse out to the Internet, launch the web browser here, and go to sublimetext.com. I could go to their website, and I could download the software. They’ve got it right here on the website. You just download it,. It’s a simple file. Once you download it, it’s not actually installed on your system. So I’ve downloaded that file. It’s sitting right here. This is a setup file, and I can run that setup file and it will install the software onto my system. Once it's installed, it will be ready to run. Now, when I run this, it's going to be copying these files to my C drive, where my operating system and other applications are stored. Now Windows is trying to make sure that this is legitimate software, and so it's warning me, it's saying, are you sure you want to install this? If it's a virus, then I'm gonna say, no, I didn't want to run that. But in this case it's software that I downloaded, that I trust, so I can say, yes, I want to install it. And now it's going to walk me through the installer, and most installers are usually pretty simple, you're just clicking next a few times. But see how it's asking where to install it C:\Program Files, is putting it on my C drive, in a folder called Sublime Text 3. That's where it's going to install to. And if I just let that finish, it's going to install. Now, when it's done, how do I run that software? Well, if I look at my computer, I don't see Sublime Text, do I? Well, Microsoft Windows tracks when software is installed and it's added right here to my start menu, there it is, right? And I can choose to make a copy of that and stick it on my desktop just like Microsoft Edge or I could add it to my task bar down here. It's up to me how I want that to be. But any time I wanna run Sublime Text I can find it right here under my Start button or Start menu. I can click it and it runs, here I am. I'm in Sublime Text, I can start text editing to my heart's desire and it's the software that I want. I'm not gonna hold to a single piece. Being able to install software is really important to making the computer work the way that you want it to work. If I wanna uninstall this software and get rid of it, well, I can delete this icon. But that doesn't actually uninstall the software, the software is still there. So Windows tracks when the software is installed all the little pieces that it creates, the filed that it copies and gives me a way to do software removal. I can take the software back off again. When we dive into our settings in Windows. Right, if I hit my start menu and I go to Settings, you'll see all sorts of settings in here for updating how the system functions, changing settings, and other things. In here I can find apps. Uninstall is one of the options, also my default apps and other things. But I can click on apps and in here I can start to see all the applications that are installed on my machine. There's a lot. A lot of these came with Windows, I didn't install them, but here's Sublime Text I did install. And so I can find that one an I can hit uninstall and it's going to remove that from my system. So Windows is giving me that ability to uninstall the software and take it out. And once I do that, it's gonna run through that process, it's gonna uninstall the software, and now it's actually gone. If I try and run Sublime Text, it's not there anymore. If I do a search, it's finding the installer, cuz I still have the install file. But the actual software is gone, and it's not available. Even if I put that icon back, the icon that was on my desktop. If I put that back, there it is. That’s just an icon. If I run it, it can’t find the program. The program is actually gone and so it offers to delete the icon for me. So being able to install and uninstall software is kind of a key piece of any operating system. Microsoft Windows just makes it really. All right, Don, as we continue on and take a look at the ideas of the operating system here. When you close out of an application, I've seen this at times where it doesn't really seem like it's actually closed out. Is there any place I can go and check and figure out whether the application has truly been closed? Absolutely, this is a multitasking operating system. It can do more than one thing at a time. And sometimes I forget. Like I might run Internet Explorer, and I might run WordPad and any other number of programs. And as I'm running each of them, they're all doing various things, right? But I don't necessarily see the juggling act that's going on behind the scenes. Well, down here in my task bar, I can see which programs are running. I see this little line under my e that lets me know Microsoft Edge is running. And I see a line under this a here which is letting me know that WordPad is running. And if I float my mouse over them, I see a preview of what that application looks like, so I don't have to bring it to the foreground. It can stay in the background and I can see what it looks like. And these are actually live, which is kind of a cool thing. If we go to YouTube or somewhere and we play a video. Let's see if we can find like a nice bunch of video. If we play a video, it will start playing in the background and so that's going on right here inside of the actual application, right? If I minimize this and I float my mouse over that E down at the bottom. If I don't have it minimized, it will actually keep that, there you can kind of see it, see how that little preview is actually moving along with it, it's pretty slick. But sometimes applications run in the background and we don't see them, right? For that, you have what's called the Task Manager. If I right-click on my taskbar down here at the bottom, I'll see a bunch of options, one of which is Task Manager. And if I go into the Task Manager, I'll see a list of all the programs that are running. I can see Microsoft Edge and the Microsoft Windows Wordpad application, they're running. And if I go to more details, I can see even more about them including how much CPU, how much memory and disk access. And how much resources they're taking away from my system. This is all part of the task management that Windows is doing all the time. It's hidden from us normally, we don't see it, and an average end user doesn't need to see this. But if you're an IT technician, and a computer is running slow, you might wanna know why. You can go into the task manager, and you can see which program is making this computer run slow and you can figure it out. Microsoft Edge for me is consumer about 10% of my CPU, 7-10%, and that's cuz it's playing a video. But that's not monopologizing my system, I'm still able to function. If my system were running really slow and I came in here and Edge was 100% of my CPU. I would know there's my problem, I need to kill off that task or whatever to take care of that. We have to be aware of tasks because there's more than one way they can run. They can run by me double clicking on them, but there's also things like scheduled tasks that run at a certain time. There might be a task that runs at 3 AM, or 1 PM. I don't run it, the system runs it, and launches it. We would see those here in the task manager. You also have what are called services. Services yet there are all these background processes. There's 36 other programs running on here, that I didn't run, the computer ran them. They're providing some kind of a service. Like here I've got the anti-malware service that's scanning for viruses on my system and stopping me from getting infected. I've had the Bonjour service that's helping me locating Apple computers on the network. And as you keep looking at the list, you'll find all sorts of services like that. The Spooler Subsystem that's helping me send print jobs to a printer, right? These are services that run in the background and they can make your system run slow sometimes as well. But normally they're providing some kind of service and they're sitting there doing nothing until you need that service. See how all of these are at 0% CPU? They're not hurting my system at all. They're just sitting there waiting. Waiting for me to get in and actually do something. And then they'll come in and interact and start to consume resources. So all of that is going on in the background. All right Don, there's also other things that end up happening. Like the idea that I have multiple people using the same computer. What do we need to do to help us to manage that a little bit more? Sure. So Microsoft Windows is a network operating system that is fully secure. So it has full capability of doing user accounts, file permissions, and isolating data from one user versus another. So you can set up permissions and controls in the way you need it. Having more than one user account on the system is really handy. If you just have one account, I sit down and i write a document i get up and i walk away. Ronnie sits down and now he's got access to my documents. All right well you know if it's a home computer or family you might not care about that. But in a work environment, that's normally a problem. So we need more than one user account to prevent that. So i can come in here and i can define multiple user accounts. If I go into my settings, you'll find an accounts section. And right now we got one account, an account for me. And so when I come in here I see Don Pezet and there we go, there's my information. But I can create more than one account so that other people can log in. So if I want Ronnie to have an account or other people, I can come in and start to define that. And so you'll see family and other people down here. I can add someone else to this PC. So I'm gonna come in and add an account for Ronnie. And now when he logs in he'll see his documents and when I log in I'll see my documents. And we don't have a conflict in overview overlap between our systems. We can maintain our privacy, but we can also have our own personal settings as well. So mainly here it could be something as simple as a wallpaper. Maybe I really like that blue smoky wallpaper that Microsoft uses by default. But Ronnie comes along and says, man I hate that wallpaper, it's just annoying, I want to set it to something different, okay? Well, shoot, it's going to make me do security questions and all that. Well, we'll just make some stuff up here. It's asking for security questions, so that if he forgets his password. Ronnie, your childhood nickname is Bob, all right, just so you know. Just so that if he forgets his password, he can reset it and get back in there. But now what I've done is I've effectively created another account for Ronnie right here, and he can log in. And when he logs in, he can set his own wallpaper, his own settings, he can set things the way that he wants, and get it customized and personalized to him. And it's not going to overlap with me. When I log in as Ronnie here for the first time, see how it's doing this, we're getting everything ready for you? It's creating a whole new environment, just for Ronnie. And so when he set's the Backstreet Boys as his wallpaper or whatever. [LAUGH] Of course you're probably more of an NSync man. So once he gets that set, I can then log in and I can add my Britney Spears wallpaper. And then it'll be fine, each of us get our own experience. We have our documents. We have our settings. Everything is laid out and personalized. That user management is really important. And that wasn't always there. In the early versions of Windows, you didn't have user accounts. Everybody logged in as the same account, if they logged in at all. Most systems just automatically logged in. Computers have come a long way since then, so that's kind of a key piece of an operating system like Microsoft. All right Don, well thank you again for helping us understand more about the idea of Microsoft Windows. There's a lot for you to explore if you haven't actually been taking a look at it from the standpoint of what you're gonna see as an IT support technician as well or as you actually start supporting other users too. Now Don, once again I'm gonna give you the last word on the subject. What do we have here? We have just scraped the tip of the iceberg as far as Windows goes. Windows is a very very powerful operating system and when you use it at home versus using it at work, it can be very, very different. So don't think that this was an all inclusive tour of everything that Windows can do. It's very powerful, so we just wanted to give you a quick overview so you can see it. If you want to learn more about Windows, we're going to continue to explore software functionality here in IT fundamentals. But in the Comptia A+ certification, we really tackle a good bit of what Windows can do. And in some of the Microsoft MTA type sort of certifications you can learn a heck of a lot more about Microsoft Windows. It is the most popular operating system in the planet, so if you're looking into an IT career, this is an operating system that's not really optional for you to learn. You need to know how Microsoft Windows functions and how it works because you will be exposed to it, it's pretty much a given. Some great advice there Don, as we continue to move forward through this series. And also thank you for joining us today, signing off for ITProTV, I'm your host Ronnie Wong. And I'm Don Pezet. Stay tuned right here for more of the Comptia IT Fundamentals show coming your way. [MUSIC] Thank you for watching ITProTV.