In this chapter:
What kind of Windows user are you, anyway?...
If you've used Windows 95, you'll probably wonder why anyone's making a fuss over Windows NT 4.0. From the outside, at least, the two operating systems look remarkably similar. There are some significant differences beneath the surface, especially when you start talking about networks. But the mechanics of opening and closing windows, starting programs, and managing files are practically identical regardless of which operating system you use.
But if you're like many, many people who have used Windows 3.1 (or its Windows NT counterparts) for years and are just now switching to Windows NT 4.0, you're in for a treat. You're also in for a bit of confusion, because Windows NT 4.0 is different, inside and out, from the Windows you've become accustomed to using.
If you found it frustrating to work with files and programs in your old version of Windows, you're not alone. When Microsoft set out to design a brand-new look for Windows 95, it asked regular people to work with Windows, and it watched as they struggled to do even simple tasks.
Then it took those lessons to heart and designed a computer operating system that should be easier to use than anything you've ever seen before. That new look and feel appeared first in Windows 95, and now it's available as part of Windows NT.
What's new in Windows NT 4.0?
In short, if you've been using Windows 3.1 for any length of time, you should expect this new Windows to make life easier and make you more productive.
This section isn't intended to be a complete set of instructions for Windows NT 4.0. Instead, the idea is to introduce Windows NT 4.0 and show you how it's different from the Windows you already know how to use.
If you see something that catches your eye, look in the margin for a pointer to the chapter that covers that feature in more detail. Windows NT 4.0 is big and complicated, with a wealth of new features, but it's also extremely consistent.
How does it all work? I'm glad you asked...
If you're used to staring at a C:\> prompt and typing WIN to start Windows, it's time to learn a new daily routine. When you flip the big red switch each morning, Windows NT 4.0 bypasses the C:\> prompt completely. The only thing you'll have to type is your password. Windows expects you to log on each time you start up; if you're hooked up to a local area network, you can connect to everything with a single logon.
Logging on isn't just for networks, either. Windows NT 4.0 lets two or more people share a single PC. Because each user has a unique logon name and password, the system can keep their personal settings and files safe and completely separate.
No matter what you're looking for, you'll start the search here.
Fig. A.1
Every time you start up Windows, you'll have to log on. The dialog box you see may look a little different, depending on your network configuration.
TIP: If you're on a Novell NetWare network, you may see a different logon box, including a box where you can enter the name of your logon server. There's no way to bypass the logon box.
When you first start up Windows NT 4.0, your first question will probably be, "What happened to Program Manager?" (Don't worry--we'll get to that in a second.) Your second question will probably be, "What happens when I click the Start button?"
There are only seven options on the Start menu, but it's hard to think of a thing you can't do when you click here. Think of the Start menu as Windows' central business district. From here, every side road leads to another interesting destination packed with surprises.
If you've used Windows for any length of time, you already know how to use the mouse. With this version of Windows, your mouse learns a new set of tricks.
Fig. A.2
The Start menu. You can get nearly anywhere from here, although it may take a few clicks...
Fig. A.3
What's the opposite of "Open Sesame?" The last option on the Start menu lets you shut down Windows quickly and safely.
Fig. A.4
When in doubt, point and click the right mouse button. Practically every object you can think of has one of these useful shortcut menus attached to it.
Fig. A.5
Drag an icon from here to there, and you can't be sure exactly what's going to happen. Use the right mouse button instead, and this pop-up menu lets you tell Windows exactly what you want it to do.
Attention, couch potatoes! If you can switch channels with your television's remote control, you can switch between all the Windows programs you have running at any given time.The Taskbar stays anchored at the bottom of the desktop, where it's always visible. Every program that's running right now, and every folder that's open, gets its own button on the Taskbar.
With Windows 3.1, you had to clear windows out of the way before you could find the one you were looking for, and you were never quite sure where all those windows hid when you needed them most. With Windows NT 4.0, it doesn't matter how many windows you have open: Look for any window's name on the Taskbar, click the button, and watch as it floats to the top of the stack.
Fig. A.6
Every running program appears on the Taskbar, which is always visible at the bottom of the desktop. Click on any button to bring that window to the top of the pile.
Don't overlook one of the coolest features of all on the Taskbar. At the far right, just to the left of the clock, you'll occasionally see a tiny status icon for part of your system: a printer, a modem, perhaps the volume control on your sound card. Right-click on any of these icons and you'll usually be surprised by the results. Use the volume control to turn off your multimedia speakers instantly, for example, before someone in the next room begins complaining about the racket.
TIP: If you learned to switch between applications using the keyboard shortcut Alt+Tab, you'll be happy to know it works in Windows NT 4.0, too. When you have more than one program running or folder open, hold down the Alt key and keep holding it down as you Tab from one program to the next. When you find the one you're looking for, release both keys to switch to that window.
If you've used Windows 3.1 for any length of time, you've learned that icons are small pictures you click to start a program. You've also learned that you can arrange icons into groups within Program Manager. In Windows 3.1, you won't find icons anywhere else, and you can't put one group inside another to keep your desktop neat.
Windows NT 4.0 is completely different. For starters, everything is an icon. Every file, every program, every printer, every computer on your company's local area network. To keep all those files neatly organized, Windows arranges them into folders. You can organize your data files the same way, even creating new folders inside folders. When you've learned how to work with one icon and one folder, you've mastered the most essential Windows skill of all.
In Windows 3.1, you could learn a few basic facts about a file by looking at it: the name, when it was created, how big it is, that sort of thing. Windows NT 4.0 lets you do the same thing (and a whole lot more) with properties sheets. When you point to any icon and click the right mouse button, a fact-packed box like the one in Figure A.7 pops up.
Fig. A.7
The Properties menu always brings up a sheet of information like this one. The exact details you'll see change from icon to icon, depending on the type of object you're pointing to.
One of the most useful choices on the right-mouse menu is the Quick Viewer. When you see Quick View on the shortcut menu of a document, you can ask Windows to show you the document itself, even if you don't have a copy of the program that created the document.
Let's say one of your favorite programs is buried in a folder inside a folder inside another folder inside three more folders. Every time you want to start that program, you double-click so many times you're thinking of applying for an index-finger transplant. To make things easier, you could move the program to a more convenient location, but that's not necessary. The better solution is to create a shortcut to the program and put it right on your desktop.
Shortcuts are tremendously useful things, and they're everywhere in Windows NT 4.0. To get a feeling for how a shortcut works, think of how you might organize a library for maximum efficiency. Would you shelve the new John Grisham novel in the fiction section? With the law books? Or in the action-adventure aisle? If you were willing to pay for three copies, you could put one in each section, but that would be wasteful. Instead, you could keep one copy in the fiction section, and place a cross-reference in the other two sections telling patrons to ask a clerk to bring them Grisham's latest.
When you put a shortcut on your desktop, it looks just like the original, except for a small arrow in the lower left corner. But it's actually only a pointer to another icon, and no matter how big the original file is, a shortcut occupies only a tiny piece of your hard disk. When you double-click on the shortcut, Windows goes searching for the original (the target is the official name) and calls it up, just as though you'd clicked on the original.
There's nothing complicated about folders. Just as you use manila folders to keep related pieces of paper together, you use Windows folders to keep related icons together. Folders always act the same, although you can take your choice of four different ways to view the icons inside, as you can see in Figure A.8.
Fig. A.8
One folder, four views. Anytime you see a window filled with icons, you can have your choice of four icon arrangements. The toolbar is optional.
TIP: If you're used to File Manager, you'll like the Details view best of all. With this arrangement of icons, you can click on the column headings to sort by the values in that column. Click again to sort in reverse order.
It's OK to keep lots of windows open, especially given how easy it is switch between windows using the Taskbar. But you will occasionally want to clear windows out of the way or close them completely. With Windows 3.1, closing a window is a big hassle. With Windows NT 4.0, it's a snap to shrink a window to an icon, expand it to its full size, or shut it down completely. Just look in the top right corner of the window for one of these four buttons:
When you upgrade your old copy of Windows 3.1 to Windows NT 4.0, your old Windows software (sometimes referred to as 16-bit Windows programs) should keep working just as they always did. There are a few exceptions, such as utility programs intended to make your hard disk run faster, but most people shouldn't have to worry about them.
Your older programs will probably work, but that doesn't mean they'll behave exactly the same as new Windows NT 4.0 programs. In fact, if you don't recognize the difference between old Windows programs and new ones, you might run into problems. Here's what to watch out for.
New 32-bit Windows programs are generally designed to run with both Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0. If you're paying close attention, you'll notice subtle differences in the way new Windows programs look. Dialog boxes, for example, are likely to have tabbed pages on them, just like the ones in Windows itself.
Not only do they look different, these new Windows programs also act differenly than their predecessors.
When you open or save a file using a new Windows program like WordPad (the word processor that comes with Windows), you can enter a long file name that helps you (or anyone else) see at a glance exactly what's inside the file. Older Windows programs don't know how to read those long file names; they're still stuck with the old DOS file-naming rules: With these old programs your file name has to be eight characters or less, not counting an optional three-letter extension tacked onto the end.
So what happens if you've created a file with a long name and then you open it with an older program that doesn't speak that language? If your long file name was a WordPad document called "Letter to my accountant, 8-24-96" the old program will chop off all but the first six characters of the name and then tack on two extra characters of its own, making the name "LETTER~1.DOC." Not very informative, is it?
Why did the old program add the DOC extension to the end of the file name? Actually, it was there all along, but Windows NT 4.0 hides those extensions when it knows what type of file you're working with. Because it knows that files ending in DOC can be opened with WordPad, it simply shows you the name.
Every time you open or save a file with a new Windows NT 4.0 program, you'll use a slick dialog box like the one shown in Figure A.10. If you think it looks a lot like Explorer, you're right. In fact, when one of these dialog boxes is open, you can do all sorts of cool things with the icons inside it.
Fig. A.9
These new dialog boxes appear when you open or save a file using a Windows NT 4.0 program. If you want to add a new folder or rename a file, you can do it here.
In short, anything you can do in a folder window or with the Windows NT Explorer, you can do in one of these dialog boxes.
New 32-bit Windows programs typically let you drag and drop icons in much more flexible ways than older programs do. They also take better advantage of shortcuts, which means you can mail a shortcut to a coworker using Windows Messaging and know that they'll be able to open it.
New Windows programs use 32 bits at a time instead of 16 bits. In theory at least, they're less likely to crash than older programs. With either type of program, though, if a bug causes your computer to stop responding, you can recover by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del; click the Task Manager button, and look in the list for a program that has stopped responding (see Fig. A.10), then shut it down without harming the rest of your open programs and data files.
Fig. A.10
No kidding--when you press Ctrl+Alt+Del, you can see a list of all the programs you're running right now. If one is misbehaving, you can make it go away with one click.
Finally, new Windows programs should be easier to install--and easier to remove later if you decide you don't need them anymore. To take care of either task, open Control Panel and double-click on the Add/Remove Programs item.
Windows NT 4.0 doesn't go through MS-DOS (the old Microsoft operating system) when you start it up, but that doesn't mean it's clueless about DOS programs. On the contrary, some of your old DOS programs that refused to run gracefully under Windows 3.1 may actually perform better under Windows NT 4.0.
If you know how to fine-tune the settings of an old DOS program, you can tweak it under Windows NT 4.0, too. Just right-click on the program's icon, then choose Properties to see a box like the one in Figure A.12.
Fig. A.11
Use this dialog box to add or remove programs. New programs can even include a way for you to uninstall them later.
Fig. A.12
Most of the stuff in this dialog box is strictly for DOS experts. Still, it's nice to know all your old MS-DOS programs will run in a window.
All those middle managers you learned how to deal with in Windows 3.1 are gone in Windows NT 4.0. There's no more Program Manager, no File Manager, no Print Manager. What happened to them? They got their pink slips because they weren't needed anymore; the jobs they used to do are now handled by other parts of Windows: the Start button replaced Program Manager, and the Windows NT Explorer replaced File Manager. (There's still a print manager of sorts, although it's not called that anymore--it's just a window with the printer's name.)
Click the Start button to pop up the Start menu, and then rest the mouse pointer on the Programs choice. After a second or so, a new menu will cascade off to the right. That's where all your Program Manager groups went
When you install a new program, instead of creating a Program Manager group, it will create a new folder containing shortcuts for all the new programs it wants you to know about, then arrange the new folder on one of the cascading menus.
Unlike Program Manager, you can rearrange these folders so that you have groups inside of groups. That makes it easier to stay organized. (The easy way to do it: Right-click on the Start button. Remember, when you're not sure what to do next, point and right-click.)
I used to have 40 program groups fighting for space in my Program Manager window, and it was occasionally impossible to find anything. With Windows NT 4.0, I've rearranged all the folders the way I like them. Now, when I call up the Start menu and click on Programs, I see a short, easy-to-follow list of the programs I use all the time (see Fig. A.13).
Fig. A.13
Windows NT 4.0 turned the old Program Manager sideways and rearranged your groups. Click here to start up any program you've installed.
You probably learned how to use the Windows 3.1 File Manager, but I'll bet you never learned to like it. Besides, with those cramped eight-character file names, what could you really do with it?
When Microsoft finished Windows NT 4.0, File Manager got a gold watch, a hearty handshake, and a one-way ticket to the retirement home. Now, when you want to move, copy, delete or rename files in Windows NT 4.0, you have a lot of choices.
The Windows NT Explorer is about the closest thing Windows NT 4.0 offers to the old File Manager. To start it up, click the Start button, choose Programs, and look for Windows NT Explorer on the first cascading menu. When you first start it up, it will probably look something like the window in Figure A.14.
Folder windows work just like the right pane of the Windows NT Explorer. If you find the Explorer view confusing, this arrangement might be easier to work with. To open a folder window, double-click on My Computer and then just keep double-clicking. A typical folder window appears in Figure A.15.
Windows NT 4.0 includes an amazingly powerful way to track down any object anywhere on your PC, or even across a network. All you need to know is a little bit of information about the thing you're looking for.
When you choose Find from the Start menu, you'll pop up a dialog box like the one in Figure A.16. Enter a part of the name if you know it. If you don't know that much, try clicking on the Advanced tab and entering a word or phrase that you're certain is in the file you're looking for. You can also tell Windows you want it to restrict its search to files in a certain location (like your Windows folder) or to files created in a certain time period, such as during the month of April, 1996.
Fig. A.14
The Windows NT Explorer is the replacement for File Manager. Click on any drive or folder on the left side and the right side shows you its contents.
Fig. A.15
The no-frills version of Explorer. When you double-click on a drive in the My Computer window, you get one of these windows.
After you click the Find Now button. Windows goes to work, poring through files in search of the ones you described. The search results list at the bottom of the Find window works just like--you guessed it--the Windows NT Explorer. You can change the view to large or small icons, sort the files by any column, even rename, copy, or delete files you see here.
Fig. A.16
What happened to that file? Choose Find from the Start menu and you can find nearly anything, nearly anywhere, even if you can only remember a few sketchy details about it.
Yes, Virginia, there is still a Control Panel, and it still looks a lot like its Windows 3.1 counterpart. As a cursory glance at the icons in Figure A.17 shows, you can adjust anything on, in, or around your computer with a few clicks.
Fig. A.17
The new and improved Control Panel lets you pop the hood on Windows and fiddle with your computer's innards.
Figure A.18 shows one of the dialog boxes that appears when you double-click on a Control Panel icon. In this case, you see the Mouse program.
Fig. A.18
What can you do with the Control Panel? This mini-program lets you replace the boring old hourglass with one that does cartwheels.
As far as Windows is concerned, a new printer can be anywhere--connected to your computer, or out on the network somewhere. Regardless of where it's located, here's how you tell Windows you want to make a new printer available: Click on the Start button and choose Settings, Printers to open the Printers folder. Double-click on the Add Printer icon to add a new printer from the lengthy list included with Windows NT 4.0; after you're done, Windows volunteers to print a test page to make sure that everything's working.
Once the printer is installed, it gets its own icon in the Printers folder, and you can check the status of the printer and any jobs by simply double-clicking on it (see Fig. A.19).
Adding a new font under Windows 3.1 is complicated. Under Windows NT 4.0, all you have to do is open the Fonts folder in the Control Panel, then choose File, Install New Font from the pull-down menus. Once the fonts are in place, you can use the same folder to print out font samples or to sort your fonts into groups of typefaces that resemble one another (see Fig. A.20).
Fig. A.19
Double-click the Add Printer icon to set up a new printer, then use this window to check on the status of your print jobs.
Fig. A.20
Look inside the Fonts folder for a detailed look at every font installed on your computer. (So that's what Haettenschweiler looks like!)
Maybe you changed your Windows 3.1 wallpaper into something flashy or fun. Maybe you even added a screen saver. But there's no comparison with the sheer number of things you can do to make your system look and feel different with the help of Windows NT 4.0.
When you right-click on any empty spot on the desktop and choose Properties, Windows pops up the Display properties dialog box (see Fig. A.21 for an example of what it might look like).
Fig. A.21
Put some personality in your PC! Right-click on an empty spot on the desktop, then choose Properties to adjust every detail of the desktop's look and feel.
Screen savers keep snoops from reading whatever you're working on if they walk by when you're not around.
Wallpaper lets you place an image on the desktop.
You can switch resolution--the number of objects you can see on the screen at one time--and color depth, which is the number of simultaneous colors you can see. Some of the changes don't require you to even restart Windows, in dramatic contrast to the way these things worked under older versions.
If you don't like the colors, fonts, and size of everything on the desktop, you can change it here by clicking on the Appearance tab.
There's an impressive set of instructions available right on the Start menu. Stumped? Click here and search for a word (see Fig. A.22). You might just find the answer you're looking for.
Fig. A.22
Help! There's an amazing amount of information in the Windows NT 4.0 Help system, including buttons that let you jump straight to the dialog box you're looking for.
Some of the old familiar Windows 3.1 accessories are gone. If you'd like, we can now observe a moment of silence for the Calendar, the Windows Anti-Virus program, and the Cardfile list manager. (If you installed Windows NT over the top of Windows 3.1, those programs may be hanging around, but there aren't new versions of them.)
But the new Windows includes enough new and genuinely useful programs and accessories that you'll probably forgive Microsoft for dropping those old programs.
The list of accessories that come free with Windows NT 4.0 includes:
Figure A.23 shows a sampling of the programs you're likely to find in the Accessories folder.
Fig. A.23
Play a CD, write a memo, dial your phone. The Windows NT 4.0 accessories are small, free programs that handle a variety of odd jobs for you.
No computer is an island. When you feel like sharing anything from files to ideas, here's where to turn.
If you've got a network adapter in your computer, you can easily share files and printers with others. To see what's out there, look in the Network Neighborhood for any other computers or file servers that might be available.
Sharing files, folders, and printers is considerably different from anything you've ever experienced in Windows. When you right-click on the icon for a drive, folder, or file and choose Properties, you'll find a Security tab that allows you to tell Windows who can and can't have access to your system. You can set things up so that some people can only read files, others can change files, and still others won't even know there are any files there.
Once the network is up and running, take advantage of it by using the built-in mail program, called Windows Messaging. It can take your mail, from other Windows users or from the Internet, and store it in a single, well-organized Inbox.
Chances are your company network already offers you access to the Internet. If that's the case, you don't need any software other than what's in Windows NT. The most interesting application of all is Internet Explorer, a browser program that lets you find information and entertainment on the World Wide Web.
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