Computer Tutorials for Beginners

On this page, you'll find links to simple, one-page tutorials. They are all aimed at complete beginners. The first section details the kind of qualifications and certificates you can get in IT. Further down, we have lots of Windows XP and Windows 7 ( and Vista) tutorials.

Microsoft Word Basics

This tutorial covers all of the features you need to get started using Microsoft Word such as text entry, formatting, spell check, bulleting, numbering, and much more. Although knowledge of how to navigate in a Windows environment is helpful, this tutorial was created for the computer beginner.

Summary

There are several things you should do to make your system more secure, and keep it performing better.:

• Change your file view settings on Windows systems so you will see all file extensions.
• Always run anti-virus software and keep the virus definitions updated at least twice per week.
• Never connect to the internet unless you are using a personal firewall or are behind an organizational firewall on a private network.
• Never open e-mail attachments without being sure of who sent them. Keep the following in mind:
  • E-mail addresses can be faked by virus programs.
  • New viruses may not be recognized by your anti-virus software.
• Patch your operating system regularly. This will reduce your vulnerabilities to worms and hackers. See the Applying the latest patches to your Windows 2000 Operating system to prevent viruses and worms article for more information.
• Patch your applications regularly especially Microsoft Office. See the Preventing Viruses in Microsoft Office® Products article for more information.
• Perform regular backups of your data.
• Make an emergency boot disk to enable you to restore your system in the event of file corruption or a virus that makes it unable to boot.
• Avoid installing unneeded applications and always be sure any free programs do not have a hidden purpose.

Making a Boot Disk

Open the Windows backup program on Windows 2000 by selecting Start, then Programs, then Accessories, then System Tools, then Backup. The backup utility will start as shown below.

When the Welcome tab is displayed in the Backup program, click on the "Emergency Repair Disk" button near the bottom. When the "Emergency Repair Diskette" dialog box appears select the checkbox next to "Also backup the registry to the repair diretory..." and click OK. You will need to put a blank floppy into your floppy disk drive.

Once the process is complete, you should label the floppy disk with the current date and the name of the system you are making the disk for.

If you ever get into a situation where your system will not boot, you can use this disk to help you recover your system. This is a somewhat technical process but it begins by pressing the F8 function key while the system is booting which will provide some advanced booting options, one of which will allow you to try to boot using your emergency repair disk. It is usually much easier to recover a system that has an emergency repair disk.

Removing Viruses

Removing viruses can be risky to your operating system and may cause you to need to re-install your operating system. If you do not feel comfortable with the instructions in this section, you should get a computer professional to do the job. For more information read Applying the latest patches to your Windows 2000 Operating system to prevent viruses and worms. It contains information about how to remove viruses along with other useful information.

Virus Removal Procedure

1. Be sure you have good backups of your data along with an emergency boot disk for your system.
2. Determine what viruses you have on your system.
   1. Install a virus scanning program if you do not have one already installed. Use the product of your choice. It is wise to read product reviews.
   2. Be sure your virus definitions are up to date. Connect to the internet and download the latest virus definitions from the company that created your anti-virus software.
   3. Configure your virus scanner not to remove any viruses but only detect them. You do not want to remove the virus(es) immediately since some viruses may infect files that your system requires to run. If these files cannot be cleaned by the anti-virus program, they may be deleted or quaranteened. If this happens you may not be able to run your system again.
   4. Scan for viruses but do not remove them. Note: Some viruses will stop your virus scanner from operating. If this is the case you will probably need the help of a computer professional. If you have a virus that stops your virus scanner then you will need to either share the drive across a network and scan it from another computer or remove your hard drive and place it into another computer as a second hard drive, then scan your hard drive.
3. Learn about the viruses you have and how to remove them. - Go to the web site of the organization that created your anti-virus software. Symantec security response site is a good site to find information about specific viruses and they provide virus removal tools.
4. Remove the viruses.
   1. Many viruses have a removal tool which can be used to remove the virus. If there is a removal tool, download it and use it to remove the virus.
   2. If there is no removal tool, you will need to follow the manual removal instructions. You may need to manually delete virus files and edit your system registry. The removal instructions will tell you how to do this, but some people may not feel comfortable doing this without the help of a computer professional.
   3. If the manual instructions indicate that you should let your virus scanner remove the virus, then remove all viruses that you can with virus removal tools then run the virus scanner with it configured to remove all viruses.

Spam

Spam is unsolited junk e-mail sent to large numbers of e-mail addresses. It is used to promote some product or service and many spam e-mails are pornographic in nature.

Spam Prevention

Unfortunately there are not very many good ways of preventing spam other than keeping your e-mail address secret. It should be kept at a level of security somewhere between your phone number and your social security number. You should be careful about who you give your email address to. Many companies will sell your email address to spam lists, thus making it available to spammers.

I currently use three email accounts as follows.

• The first account is the one I give to personal acquaintances.
• The second account I give to companies that have a privacy policy that I am fairly certain won't sell my e-mail address.
• The third account, I give to companies that I believe I cannot trust to sell my information. I don't worry if these companies can contact me.

I expect to change the third account pretty often, but hopefully the first two will last several years without much spam. The third account may be through a free internet email account service such as hotmail or yahoo.

Managing Spam

Besides keeping your e-mail address secret, the next best spam relief are programs that help you manage spam. Spam can be filtered at the mail server with some programs or they can be a program that plugs into your e-mail client program such as Outlook or Outlook Express. Basically these types of programs filter spam based on several characteristics such as:

• The subject line
• The address of the sender
• Some programs scan the message content and consider length or wording.

Unfortunately none of these scanning methods are 100% accurate although some claim to achieve success rates into the upper 90 percentile. What most of these programs do is to create folders for "friendly" mail or "unfriendly" mail. The friendly mail is put into one folder, unfriendly mail is put into a second folder and there may be a third folder for unknown mail. Unfriendly mail is automatically deleted after some period of time. The capabilities and handling of the mail will vary from program to program. Some that I have considered using include:

• Qurb
• I Hate Spam
• Spam Assassin

There are various opinions about what works when fighting spam. For more information and articles about how to fight spam you can find links to articles at Computer Technical Tutorials Spam .

Spam for Webmasters

If you are a webmaster, spammers will send spam to your domain by sending it to general possible accounts such as administration@yourdomain.com. One way to prevent this is to configure your account with your hosting provider not to respond to undeliverable emails and just automatically delete them. This is called a "::blackhole" setting. The only problem with this is that spammers will still use your bandwidth that you pay for to send you their junk, even though your server deletes them. As spam gets more excessive, it may increase bandwidth costs for webmasters thus discouraging some sites from operating.

Why Spam Should be Illegal

When you connect to the internet, you are paying for a specific service for your use. This service costs a specific amount of money and provides a certan connection speed to the internet. This connection speed indicates your bandwidth. The greater the connection speed, the higher the bandwidth. The higher speed connections cost more money. At this poiint you have paid for the privilege of surfing the internet with your web browser, sending and receiving e-mail, and other activities. The speed at which you can do this is limited by your bandwidth and how fast you can click pages or send or receive e-mail. Consider the Following diagram:

Each person has a connection to the internet. If the person on the right chooses to use their connection to send e-mail or junk e-mail (spam), that is their choice. They are paying for their connection and they are willing to use it in that manner.

If the person on the left does not want to receive spam, but wants to read personal e-mail and surf the internet, they are willing to receive only personal e-mail. If someone is sending them a lot of spam, they will need to wait for the junk e-mail to be delivered before they can read much of their personal e-mail. They are an unwilling participant regarding the unsolicited e-mail they are receiving. Not only is their connection being used by someone else, but it will take them additional time to sort the mix of e-mail out to get to the mail they want to read. If the receiver had willingly stated that they were interested in receiving the advertisements, it would be another matter.

Of course the sender of the spam is not using all the spam receiver's internet connection, but the spam receiver does not get the opportunity to use their connection in the way they fully intended even though they were the one paying for it. This is the same as stealing even though the effective amount may be small. Imagine, how rich you could be if you could only steal a fraction of a cent per day or week from everyone who uses the internet. That's why spam should be illegal.

Someone may argue that spam is the same as junk mail sent through the postal service so why would it be stealing. This is not true since the sender of mail through the postal service pays for the cost of both pickup and delivery. On the internet, the sender pays for the cost of pickup and the receiver pays for the cost of delivery.

The Real and Permanent Solution to Spam and Viruses

Unfortunately a permanent and good solution will take years to implement. A new mail protocol (method of sending e-mail) must be developed by the internet community and then e-mail servers must be modified to handle that protocol. The changing of the e-mail servers will take the most time.

I believe all e-mail should be digitally signed by the sender in order to be delivered. This way the sender cannot be faked and everyone must take responsibility for their own e-mails. However to get this to work right someone must find a way to keep viruses from being able to digitally sign your e-mails for you automatically. A bug in your e-mail client may allow a virus to digitally sign your e-mails causing this type of solution to be ineffective, however, in this case, there would be no doubt as to who has the virus.

Some Proposed Solutions that Won't Work

• Paying for each e-mail sent - This solution will not work because it forces people to pay for services that they have already paid for. Additionally it will not prevent spammers from using poorly configured servers to send spam illegally. It will most likely force victims (those who get viruses and administrators who have spammers illegally relay mail through their mail servers) to pay for the additional e-mail. On the brighter side, it may force more administrators to lock their systems down better and force computer users to be more careful about getting viruses. If this were done, I would think it would make the most sense to allow a limited amount of email to be send on a monthly basis for free.
• Reverse address to name lookup - Some ISP's want to use a check that looks at the address the mail came from and determine the name of the server. If the name does not match the name advertised by the sending mail server, then the e-mail is assumed to be spam and dropped with no notification to the sender. Not only does this violate the rules (protocol) governing the internet for sending e-mail, it will cut down or eliminate the ability for web based programs to automatically notifify users at some websites about events. For instance forum sites will notify when someone has posted an answer to a question. If the user's ISP uses reverse lookup, the user may never see the email from the forum website where they asked a question.

E-mail Viruses

Viruses that spread through e-mail have a common method of spreading. This page will discuss how common e-mail viruses currently spread.

The Virus Lifecycle

Viruses begin their life when someone releases them on the internet. They begin to spread. At this early stage of their lifecycle, no one is aware of their presence. As the virus becomes more widely spread, someone will recognize an abnormal problem with their system and investigate. Eventually a computer expert will conclude that a virus exists and notify companies that write anti virus software. The companies will research the virus and come out with an update to their database of viruses that includes information about the new virus and has information about how to recognize it. They may also release a tool that can be used to automatically remove that virus from computer systems.

Therefore the cycle is:

1. Release - The virus is released.
2. Recognition - Someone recognizes the virus.
3. Virus recognition database update - Antivirus programs will now recognize the virus.
4. Antiivirus update and removal tools

The time between step one and step three above can be significant. During this time you are vulnerable to getting the virus because your anti-virus software will not recognize it as a virus. This is why you should be careful about the e-mail attachments that you open, even if you are actively running anti-virus software.

How Viruses Work

1. When a victim of a virus double clicks on an infected attachment, the virus will run.
2. The virus will modify the victim's system so it will always be active when the system is turned on.
3. The virus will scan the victim's address book in their e-mail client program such as Outlook or Outlook Express.
4. In the past, viruses would then mail themselves to addresses found in the victim's address book. But today many viruses choose random recipients and senders from the victim's address book. This means that although the e-mail is sent from the victim's machine, the e-mail sender address is faked to appear as though someone else in the victim's address book sent the message.

What to Do

• Always run anti-virus software and be sure it gets updated at least twice per week.
• If you get a virus in an e-mail attachment and you are sure it is a virus, delete the e-mail message.
• If you get an attachment from someone you know, consider whether there is enough personal information in the e-mail which a virus program would not know. If you are not sure your acquaintance sent the e-mail call them and be sure before opening the attachment. Do not count on your anti-virus software being able to stop you from getting infected if you open the e-mail attachment. Remember, viruses are not recognized right away by your anti-virus software and you could get a new unrecognized virus before your virus definition updates are released.
• If you get an e-mail saying a message you sent was undeliverable and you did not send the message, consider whether your system is behaving abnormally. You probably do not have a virus, but if you are not sure, use your anti-virus software to perform a system scan for viruses and remove any viruses found using the procedure in the section about "Removing Viruses", then delete the e-mail.
• If you get an e-mail saying a message you sent contained a virus, consider whether your system is behaving abnormally. You probably do not have a virus, but if you are not sure, use your anti-virus software to perform a system scan for viruses and remove any viruses found using the procedure in the section about "Removing Viruses", then delete the e-mail.

Example

Below is shown an e-mail from a virus as an example of how a virus writer will try to fool computer users.

From: staff@yourorganization.org [mailto:staff@yourorganization.org] Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2004 4:41 AM To: usertofool@yourorganization.org Subject: Important notify about your e-mail account.  Dear user of e-mail server "Yourorganization.org",  Our antivirus software has detected a large  ammount of viruses outgoing from your email account, you may use our free anti-virus tool to  clean  up your computer software.  For further  details see the attach.  For security reasons attached file  is password protected. The password is "22352".  Cheers,    The Yourorganization.org  team                   http://www.yourorganization.org   

Of course there is an attachment. In this case the virus sent a zipped file (.zip) and instructed the user how to open it. It was encrypted in a zipped file so the anti-virus scanner could not detect it!