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