Hello. Today I'm going to be talking a
little bit about the "Computer" utility

available in Windows 7 and how you can
use it to navigate amongst your folders

and files and to copy and move and
rename and delete files and folders.

There are a lot of different ways you
can bring it up: You can click on the

Start menu and choose computer. From
there you might have a desktop icon. My

favorite way of bringing it up is using
the keyboard shortcut: You hold down the

"Windows" key which is the key with the
Microsoft Windows' logo on it between the

"Control" and "Alt" keys in the lower
left-hand corner of your keyboard. And

with the Windows key held down, hit the "e" key. Windows^e

will bring up Computer, and when you
first bring it up you're able to see

your different drives. A drive is going
to be represented by a capital letter,

and different drives might stand for
different things; the hard disk drives

here stand for a part of the space on a hard
disk that at this point is currently

located in the computer that you're
working with at the moment. You will most

typically have a c: drive -- again
representing part or possibly all of the

storage space on the hard disk located
in your computer. I happen also to have a

different drive as part of my hard disk
drive -- my f: drive. You probably aren't

going to be seeing a: or b: drives
nowadays; both the letters "a" and "b" were

reserved for use for floppy disk drives. Before there were hard disk drives,

non-volatile storage media were floppy
disk drives or floppy disks and

computers at one point actually often
had two separate floppy disk drives: You'd

have your operating system fit on a
single floppy disk back when we were

using Microsoft DOS and you would have a
second disk drive -- your b: drive -- for your

programs and for your data. A little bit
further down here you see that I've got

a d: drive that's a removable storage
medium.

The letters after c: are often used for
things like DVD drives, CD drives, thumb

drives, and the like. Down in this lower
section you see I've got a number of

different network locations. These are
storage space that are somewhere on the

network -- where they are is irrelevant;
they're just not on our computer. Right

now you can see that the network
locations have a cable as part of their

icon I'm going to open up my z: drive. By
double clicking on it and I can see now

that I'm in the root directory of my z:
drive. The root directory of the drive is

the very very top of the drive. Within
here I see that I have quite a number

of folders, and then I have the files
underneath. I'm going to open up my file

"practice folder." Suppose I wanted to go
back to where I just came from. I could

click on the left arrow to revisit the
place that I just came back from. I would

click on the right arrow just as you would
in Internet Explorer. Nothing surprising

there. We also, however, have available
what Microsoft calls "breadcrumbs," so if I

wish to click to just go back to the z:
drive, I could click on this. I could

click on the "Computer" breadcrumb if I
wanted to go all the way back up to the

top. Suppose I wanted to go into a
different folder within the z: drive. If I

click on the down arrow just to the
right of the z: drive's breadcrumb, I can

see all of the folders that are listed
within the z: drive and I could click on

one that I chose to go into. I'm going to
click on my back arrow again to return

to my "file practice" folder. Now, I have a
different video that you can look at

that discusses changing views within
Computer. I'm going to change to the

Details view,

and in this folder you can see that I
have quite a number of different items.

In here I've got 19 items altogether.
19 is perfectly manageable, but suppose

instead of having 19 items in here I had
nineteen hundred items. That would be

very difficult to try to maneuver around,
to try to find what you're interested in.

If you start getting too many items in
a folder to be able to find what you're

interested in quickly and easily, you
might wish to create a subfolder, and

there are a variety of different ways you
can do that. In fact, there are quite a

number of different ways you can perform
most of the tasks I'm going to be

discussing today. I will show you a few
different ways; if you know of other ways

and they do the job, more power to you to
you! Use whatever way you find easiest. So

one way you can create a new folder is
to right-click a blank part of this pane

and choose "New Folder. " You'll be given
the option to give the folder a name.

Maybe I'd like to move all my documents
my Word documents in here, so I'll call

it "Docs" and I'll click out here, then I
stop and reconsider: "Docs" might not be

the best name. You want a name that is
reasonably short, but you want a name

that is descriptive enough. "Docs" might
be short for "documents"; it might also be

short for "doctors," and depending on the
context which is intended might be

obvious or it might not be. I'd like to
make this a little bit clearer, so I'm

going to right click on "Docs" and choose
"Rename." Now I can name it with the more

descriptive "Documents." I'd like to move
all of my documents into this new folder;

they're scattered around here. One thing
I could do would be to sort everything.

I'm going to be sorting by type and I
can do this in the Details view, and then

I wish to select the items that I would
like to copy or to move into my

Documents folder. If you wish just to
move one individual item, you can just

click on it to select it. If you wish to
select multiple items that are all right

next to each other, you can click on the first item hold, the

"Shift" key down, and while the "Shift" key
is held down, click on the last item.

Clicking and then shift^clicking will
select everything from the first item to

the last item and everything in between.
Suppose I wanted all of these items

except for some reason I'd like to have
my English notes stay where it is. I'd

like all the other documents to be moved
into the "Documents" folder, but the English

notes I'd like to keep where they are. If
that's the case, I can hold the "Control" (ctrl) key

down and with the "Control" key held down,
I can click on "English notes."

Control^clicking will toggle the item you're
control^clicking on between being

selected and not selected, and keep
everything else in the same state it had

been. So I've re-selected my "English notes." Now I would like to move these all of

these documents into my "Documents" folder. There are quite a number of different

ways that I could move them. One thing I
could do is I could simply drag these

items and drop them onto the "Documents"
folder, and that would move them. I'm not

going to do that, though. Another way is, I
could right-drag them -- hold the right

mouse button down and drag them on top of the "Documents" folder, and I'm given a

menu. I could choose at this point to
move them; that's the default -- you can see

"Move Here" is bolded. That means that if I
had just regular dragged -- held the left

mouse button down and dragged and
dropped onto the "Documents" folder -- the

items would have been moved. I could also
choose to copy these items or to create

shortcuts within the "Documents" folder
pointing to these items. I'm going to

cancel this. All of these drag and drop
and right-drag and drop methods work

beautifully if you see both what it is
you'd like to copy or move and where

you'd like to copy or move it to. Now you
can certainly use the left pane's "Folders"

pane to be able to display the folder
that you're interested in moving to, but

there's another method of moving things
or copying things from one random

location to another random location you
don't have to have

with visible at the same time; that is to
cut and paste, and there are a variety of

different ways that you can cut the
items. One way is to right-click on the

selected items and choose "Cut." When you
choose "Cut," the items are grayed out a

little bit. Then navigate to wherever
you'd like to have the items placed --

where you'd like to have them "pasted," to
use the technical term. So I've opened up

my "Documents" folder by double clicking
on it. I'll right-click on an empty part

of this pane and I'll choose "Paste". You
can see the documents are now in my

"Documents" folder. If I go up to my "File
practice" folder, they're no longer

available in here, so you can cut and
paste to move things. If you wish to copy

items, the process is almost identical. Maybe I want a copy of "grades 1" and "grades 3."

I clicked on "grades 1," control-clicked on
"grades 3." I can right-click on "grades 3"

now, but now instead of choosing "cut" to
cut and paste to move the item, I'll

choose "copy." Copy and paste will make a
copy of these two items and place them

wherever I choose choose to paste them.

If you don't like all this right-clicking , there's another thing you can

use, if you have access to your menu bar. Your menu bar might be hidden; if you

don't see this menu bar in Computer, you
can go to "Organize," "Layout" and click on

"Menu Bar." That will display -- this is a
toggle -- If I were to click on "Menu Bar"

now, this menu bar would actually be
hidden. So if you do

see your menu bar, you can go to the "File"
menu and choose "new," and "Folder." This is a

different way of creating a folder, and
maybe I'd like to put all of my

spreadsheets into this new folder, so I
name this new folder "spreadsheets." I'm

going to click and shift-click to select the 
"grades 1" through "grades 6"

spreadsheets. Go up to the "Edit" menu item and I can choose now to cut or to copy

if I want to cut and paste or copy and
paste to move or copy. I'm going to move

them, so I'll just cut. I'll go into
"spreadsheets," edit, paste. Now you may have

noticed on this edit menu that next to
cut and next to copy we've got some

couple of strange sequences of
characters ctrl+X and ctrl+C. What are

they about? Well, they're keyboard shortcuts. If you wish to cut, what this menu is

saying with this is that you can
select your items by holding the ctrl key down, and

while the ctrl key is held, down hit
and release the X key. Control^X on the

keyboard does the exact same thing as
going up to the Edit menu and choosing

"Cut." Similarly, control^C is the equivalent of edit-->copy. At the

moment, the next slide option (paste)
is grayed out, but you could see that

paste has ctrl+v as its keyboard
shortcut. Why control V? There are a

couple of reasons. One is that ctrl+p
was already taken: Ctrl+p is the

keyboard shortcut for if you want to print
something, but the other reason has to do with the

keyboard layout. If you cut an item or if
you copy an item, the next logical thing

you're going to be doing is moving to a
particular location and pasting it. so if

you're doing a lot with keyboard
shortcuts, your hand has just gone to

ctrl+x or ctrl+c, and your finger
might still be on the X or the C key. If

you take a look at your keyboard, V is
right next to the X and C; It goes XCV,

so V was just chosen because it's
right near the X and the C. It's a

little bit more efficient.

So today we've
talked about how to open and use

Computer, we saw how you can navigate
within Computer, how

you can create folders, why you'd want to
create folders, how you can select

specific items to delete, to rename, to
copy and paste and cut and paste.

Actually I don't think I talked about
delete. I apologize. To delete an item,

simply click on it, hit the Delete key,
and if it asks do you want to delete

this, yes you do. So we've talked about
navigating, copying and moving files and

folders. We've talked about the
significance of the different drive

letters, and now you should be able to
maneuver around Computer without any

difficulty. 
Thank you