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• Click icons once to select them.

• Click icons twice to use them.

• Right-click anything and select Properties to see its properties.

Great! If you opened Notepad properly, you should see something like Figure 4-27, with Notepad displaying an untitled text page. Notice how Notepad shows up on the taskbar at the bottom of your screen. Most running programs appear on the taskbar in this way. Close the Notepad program by clicking on the button with the X in the upper-right corner of the Notepad window. Look again at the taskbar to see that Notepad no longer appears there.

Figure 4-27 Notepad application (note the buttons in the upper-right corner)

Now look all the way to the right end of the taskbar. This part of the taskbar is known officially as the notification area, though many techs and the CompTIA A+ certification exams call it the system tray. You will at a minimum see the current time displayed in the system tray, and on most Windows systems you’ll also see a number of small icons there. Figure 4-28 shows the system tray on my PC.

Figure 4-28 System tray showing several icons and the time

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EXAM TIP Microsoft calls the area at the far right of the taskbar the notification area, but you might see it referred to on the CompTIA A+ certification exams as the system tray.

These icons show programs running in the background. Most programs run in a window. Background programs function like any other program except they do not use a window, simply because the nature of their particular jobs makes a window unnecessary. Thousands of programs like to run in the system tray: network status, volume controls, battery state (on laptops), and removable device status are just a few examples. What shows up on yours depends on your version of Windows, what hardware you use, and what background programs you have installed. Some of the icons in Figure 4-28, for example, include my antivirus program, a handy notification program for incoming Facebook and Twitter messages, and my UPS program.

Near the left end of the taskbar, next to the Start button, you will find the Quick Launch toolbar (Figure 4-29), a handy extra where you can select often-used programs with a single click. On Windows XP systems, the Quick Launch toolbar is not displayed on the taskbar by default, so before you can use this convenient feature, you must right-click the taskbar, select Properties, and check Show Quick Launch. To change the contents of the Quick Launch toolbar, simply drag icons onto or off of it.

Figure 4-29 Quick Launch toolbar

The Many Faces of Windows Explorer

Windows Explorer enables you to manipulate files and folders stored on all the drives in or connected to your computer. Microsoft presents the tool in a variety of ways to help you focus quickly on what you want to accomplish. If you want to see the contents of an optical disc, for example, you can open My Computer (Windows 2000/XP) or Computer (Windows Vista/7) by double-clicking the icon on the desktop or selecting the icon from the Start menu to have Windows Explorer open with the drives displayed (Figure 4-30). To display the contents of a drive or folder, double-click it.

Windows Explorer in Windows 2000 has a fairly Spartan interface, whereas Windows XP offers a series of common tasks in a bar along the left side of the screen, as you can see in Figure 4-30. Windows Vista also offers tasks, but the options display in a bar below the location bar, near the top of the window (Figure 4-31).

When you access My Documents (Windows 2000/XP) or Documents (Windows Vista/7) by double-clicking the icon on the desktop or selecting from the Start menu, Windows opens Windows Explorer with your user folders displayed. Because your My Documents/Documents folder is stored (by default) on the C: hard drive, Windows Explorer shows the contents of that drive, drilled down specifically to your folders.

The fact that one way to open Windows Explorer is to double-click My Computer or Computer, and another way to open Windows Explorer is to double-click