Basic Computer Skills Archives

Delete a Desktop Shortcut

At times your desktop can get cluttered with desktop shortcuts and program icons making it hard to find things on the desktop and generally makes it cluttered.
When your desktop gets to a point where it is suffering from “desktop clutter” it’s time to delete a desktop shortcut or two.
Deleting a Program Desktop Shortcut
Deleting a program [...]

Arrange Desktop Shortcuts

Continuing with our desktop shortcuts series, now that you have created a custom desktop shortcut, you are probably wondering how to organize all the desktop shortcuts you have.

Right click your desktop.
A menu appears.

Left click the Arrange Icons By menu item.
A new menu list appears.

Arrange Icons By
Once you left click the Arrange Icons By menu item, [...]

Rename Desktop Shortcuts

When you create a desktop shortcut, by default Windows adds Shortcut to in front of the file or folder name the shortcut is for.
If you decide to use Auto Arrange to arrange the desktop shortcuts on your Windows desktop, all the icons with Shortcut to will be grouped.
Also, with Shortcut to added to the beginning [...]

How to Create a Desktop Shortcut

In this second article about desktop shortcuts we will cover how to create a desktop shortcut for a file or folder on your computer and one for a web page on the Internet.
Create Desktop Shortcut for a File or Folder
When you use a particular file or folder a lot, placing a desktop shortcut to that [...]

Desktop Shortcuts

Ever noticed when you install a program an icon appears on your desktop? These
icons are desktop shortcuts, which when clicked, open the program associated
with it.
You can create your own desktop shortcuts also.
Uses for Desktop Shortcuts
A desktop shortcut can be used to:

Save time getting to a specific folder on your computer.
Be a [...]

Schedule a Task in Windows

We keep being reminded to do things to keep our computers in tip top shape (backup our data, defrag the drives, update our virus programs, etc.) but some just don’t seem to get around to doing these things on a regular basis. This is where Task Scheduler, available with Windows, can help you out [...]

Saving Downloads

You can spend hours searching the internet for documents and programs that you need to learn more about a topic or increase the productivity of your computer use. You find a program to try out that seems to meet your needs or a document that you will need to reference in the future and [...]

Back Up Your Computer

Have you ever had your computer crash? Been infected with a virus, spyware or trojan? Or made the silly mistake of overwriting an existing file when you shouldn’t have? Installed a piece of hardware or software that made your computer malfunction? These type of things happen to everyone, experienced computer user or not.
If any [...]

Folder Details View

Sometimes when working with files it would be nice to see file details like file name, file size and date last modified. This can be done by changing the Folder view to Details.
The Folder Details view can be adjusted to show as much or as little file information as you like.
Setting Folder View to [...]

Open File in Windows

Windows is a difficult program/operating system to learn because there so many ways to do the same thing.
Below are a couple of ways to open a file in Windows. You might have been shown another way to do this. It doesn’t mean what you have been shown is wrong. You were just shown [...]