Easy Computer Help: Computer Training & Tips to Learn Computer Basics
• Sunday, March 23, 2008 - How Does Wireless Internet Work - A Simple Explanation
In this article I'll help you understand the answer to a computer terminology question I find a lot of people asking: "How does wireless Internet work?".
Before I can answer this question, I have to mention that there are two basic types of wireless Internet: a wireless Internet connection through a device called a router (this type of wireless Internet is called WiFi), and then there is wireless Internet access through the cell phone network.
Wireless routers are very common in homes, offices, and "wireless hotspots" like you find at coffee shops, airports, and elsewhere. These are basically just small electronic "boxes" that hook up to your Internet connection so you can share the connection between several computers, or simply to give you the freedom to place your computer wherever you want, and not just next to the cable or phone outlet.
The cell phone data network (wireless Internet through the cell phone network in other words) of course is very widespread -- pretty much everywhere where you can get a cell signal -- and can be used not only with a cell phone but also with a growing number of computers.
Now if you want to get really technical, these two types of wireless Internet work differently. But in a general sense, if you simplify things and explain them in a basic way that will make sense to the average person, they both work along the same general lines.
So how does wireless Internet work? One way to think of it is by comparing it to a portable phone.
With a portable phone, something most of us have in our home, the phone has two parts: a handset and a cradle.
The cradle gets plugged into the phone line -- the connection to the phone network -- and takes that connection and broadcasts it via radio waves more or less in all directions.
If the handset is within range of the signal, it picks up this signal and relays the telephone connection so you can make or receive a call.
Wireless Internet, whether its via a cell network or a wireless router, works the same basic way: you have a connection to the Internet, which is sent out wirelessly to a receiver of some sort, very much like a portable phone cradle sends out the telephone connection to the handset.
The broadcast can come from a wireless router hooked up to a cable or DSL Internet connection, or the broadcast can be from a cell phone tower hooked into the cell phone network and relaying the Internet connection.
On the other end you have a "handset", which is a receiver in a computer, smart phone, or other device. This could be a WiFi card in a laptop or desktop computer for the one type of wireless Internet, or a receiver in a cell phone or laptop using the cell data network.
So that basically answers the question "how does wireless Internet work?". |
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• Wednesday, March 12, 2008 - What is RAM, What is a Hard Drive: A Plain English Explanation
When it comes to a computer, there are so many computer terms like RAM, megahertz, gigabytes, etc. that people can find confusing. Having a better understanding of some of these terms can help you feel more comfortable using your computer, and ultimately get more out of it.
A lot of people I talk to seem to be apologetic about their lack of knowledge. It's too bad people feel that way; they really shouldn't. What I tell them is that while they may not know as much as I do about computers, there's nothing wrong with that, and they probably know a lot of other things I don't know much about.
All you need is someone who takes the time to explain things to you in a way that makes sense.
One term many people confuse is memory or RAM. A lot of people ask "are RAM and memory the same thing?", and don't understand the difference between RAM, memory, or hard drive storage space.
RAM is a type of memory -- it stands for Random Access Memory (don't worry, you don't need to remember that!).
It is a temporary working space the computer uses to get work done, which gets emptied when the computer is turned off.
Here's an easy way to understand this computer term: Think of it like a work bench or table.
You have a project you're working on and you do your project on the bench and when you're done, you clear it off.
The hard drive is the main place your computer uses to store information. It looks like a rectangular metal box which contains a non-removable disk (as opposed to something like a CD Drive where you can take the disk out).
It is the disk inside the drive which stores everything on your computer -- every picture, every music file, every email, and every Word document. Not only that, but Windows or Mac OS X, the operating system that makes the computer run.
To continue our analogy, think of it as a set of shelves where you store the tools or materials for your project -- when you want to work on something you choose the things you need from the shelves, put them on the bench and work on the project.
This is like when you run a program; the computer loads the program from the hard drive into memory (the temporary working space).
So the larger the shelves, the more you can store -- i.e. the more programs you can have installed, the more songs or pictures or videos you can save on your computer.
Most people with a computer made in the last few years have far larger hard drives than they'll ever use. Few people ever fill them up, unless they are keeping a lot of large files such as sound files or pictures, or especially video files.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If that's true, video is worth at least a million words, and the files can be that much bigger!
If someone tells you you need more memory, or your computer gives you an error message about being low on memory, this usually means you don't have enough RAM. This can slow your computer down drastically.
Think of the bench idea again: if your bench is very small, you can't fit everything you need on it to get your work done, so you're constantly wasting time moving one piece of the project off the bench to make room for the next piece... if you can really work at all.
Both RAM and hard drive space are measured with the same terms: bytes, kilobytes (KB), megabytes (MB), gigabytes (GB), with newer drives even being measured in terabytes (TB). Since both RAM and hard drives are measured in the same way, this may be one reason people confuse the two terms.
You don't need to understand exactly what those computer terms mean, but understand that each one is basically a thousand times larger than the one before. So a kilobyte is 1,000 times larger than a byte, a megabyte is 1,000 times larger than a kilobyte, a gigabyte is a thousand times later than that, and so on.
The reason you buy a computer one year that has a lot of RAM, and two or three years go by and suddenly someone tells you you don't have enough memory, is because each year the average size of programs, and the amount of memory they need, gets larger.
It's as if the tools you use on your workbench keep growing every year so you eventually have to get a larger bench.
If your computer seems to be running more slowly recently, or you've been having odd errors, it could be that you need to upgrade your memory. This isn't always the source of these problems, but RAM is very inexpensive these days and adding to what your computer has can add life to your Mac or PC.
Hopefully this clears up the meaning of these basic computer terms for you, and made a lot more sense than it used to!
Worth Godwin is a computer coach with over 13 years experience helping computer users in Plain English. He's also worked "in the trenches" as a hardware and software tech, solving real-world computer problems.
Worth has an easy email newsletter that you can join now for free. When you join, he'll send you free computer tips, translate basic computer terminology into plain English, and you'll get easy audio and video computer lessons for free.
You can start getting free lessons immediately by just typing in your name and email address below right now:
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• Wednesday, March 12, 2008 - How Does Wireless Internet Work - A Simple Explanation of Computer Terminology
How Does Wireless Internet Work -
A Simple Explanation of Computer Terminology
In this article I'll help you understand the answer to a computer terminology question I find a lot of people asking: "How does wireless Internet work?".
Before I can answer this question, I have to mention that there are two basic types of wireless Internet: a wireless Internet connection through a device called a router (this type of wireless Internet is called WiFi), and then there is wireless Internet access through the cell phone network.
Wireless routers are very common in homes, offices, and "wireless hotspots" like you find at coffee shops, airports, and elsewhere. These are basically just small electronic "boxes" that hook up to your Internet connection so you can share the connection between several computers, or simply to give you the freedom to place your computer wherever you want, and not just next to the cable or phone outlet.
The cell phone data network (wireless Internet through the cell phone network in other words) of course is very widespread -- pretty much everywhere where you can get a cell signal -- and can be used not only with a cell phone but also with a growing number of computers.
Now if you want to get really technical, these two types of wireless Internet work differently. But in a general sense, if you simplify things and explain them in a basic way that will make sense to the average person, they both work along the same general lines.
So how does wireless Internet work? One way to think of it is by comparing it to a portable phone.
With a portable phone, something most of us have in our home, the phone has two parts: a handset and a cradle.
The cradle gets plugged into the phone line -- the connection to the phone network -- and takes that connection and broadcasts it via radio waves more or less in all directions.
If the handset is within range of the signal, it picks up this signal and relays the telephone connection so you can make or receive a call.
Wireless Internet, whether its via a cell network or a wireless router, works the same basic way: you have a connection to the Internet, which is sent out wirelessly to a receiver of some sort, very much like a portable phone cradle sends out the telephone connection to the handset.
The broadcast can come from a wireless router hooked up to a cable or DSL Internet connection, or the broadcast can be from a cell phone tower hooked into the cell phone network and relaying the Internet connection.
On the other end you have a "handset", which is a receiver in a computer, smart phone, or other device. This could be a WiFi card in a laptop or desktop computer for the one type of wireless Internet, or a receiver in a cell phone or laptop using the cell data network.
So that basically answers the computer terminology question "how does wireless Internet work".
Worth Godwin is a computer coach with over 13 years experience helping computer users in Plain English. He's also worked "in the trenches" as a hardware and software tech, solving real-world computer problems.
Worth has an easy email newsletter that you can join now for free. When you join, he'll send you free computer tips, translate basic computer terminology into plain English, and share easy audio and video computer lessons with you for free.
You can start getting free lessons immediately by just typing in your name and email address below right now:
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• Saturday, March 8, 2008 - Understanding Computer Terminology: What's the Real Meaning of Web, Internet, and Email?
In this article I want to help you understand the computer terms Web, Internet, and Email.
Now you may think you know what these computer terms mean, but I've found that in fact, most people misuse and misunderstand 2 or 3 of those words every day!
Now please understand me -- it's not your fault if you sometimes get computer terminology wrong. It's just never been explained to you the right way for you to really get it, and chances are, you've been hearing other people misuse the terms too, since it's pretty common to mix them up.
Let me see if I can make it easier for you.
Let's start with email -- this is the one that most people get basically right, although they still misunderstand one important thing about it (more on that in a minute).
Email is, of course, "electronic mail" -- a pretty simple concept to get. Its the computer equivalent of a traditional letter. Traditional mail through the post office is often called "snail mail" these days because it takes days to get to the person you're sending it to, unlike email which can take seconds (although sometimes can take hours).
Even snail mail is pretty amazingly fast compared to how it used to be back in the day, when it could take weeks or months to get to someone.
Just like regular mail, email has a sort of post office that it goes through - something called a "mail server".
There are two types of mail server - POP and SMTP. But I prefer to use the terms incoming and outgoing because it makes more sense than the technical terms.
Don't worry about what the letters POP and SMTP stand for. Just remember:
POP = incoming, for mail that's coming in to you
and
SMTP = outgoing, for the email you're sending out.
Let's talk about the word "Web" now.
The Web is what most people think of as "the Internet" -- it's the web pages, or pages of words, pictures, and sometimes sounds and videos even, which you go and visit using your "web browser".
A web browser is just a program that lets you look at web pages -- most Windows people click on the blue E, which is Internet Explorer (made by Microsoft and given away with every copy of Windows, which is why most people use it. NOT because it's the best option).
Most Mac people with fairly new Macs use Apple's web browser Safari, which has an icon that looks like a little compass.
Other people, both Mac users and Windows users, use a different program called Mozilla Firefox.
For a lot of good reasons, I strongly strongly recommend that Windows users do NOT use "the blue E" -- Internet Explorer -- the main reason is because it is very unsafe and is almost a guarantee that your PC will get infected with something nasty.
Mac users should not use "the blue E" (Internet Explorer) either, but more because it's very out of date and just doesn't work with many modern websites anymore.
One way to think of a web browser is like a car that lets you drive around on the "information super-highway" as they used to call the Web back in the 90s.
Some brands of cars are safer than others -- you could almost think of Internet Explorer as one of those old Poison Pintos, and Mozilla Firefox as a Volvo -- not a guarantee to save you from harm, but a lot safer than a Pinto!
One point of confusion some people have is that sometimes you can use web browsers to read your email. Like if you use Yahoo mail or Hotmail.
In that case, you are looking at your email through what's called "webmail" because you are using Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, or Apple's Safari to view your mail.
It's kind of like going to the post office and reading your mail there. Throwing some of it away, and then putting the stuff you want to keep back in the post office box for storage.
Using an email program like Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Eudora, or Apple's OS X Mail, is more like reading your mail at home, and storing the stuff you want to keep at home instead of at the post office.
Now let's talk about the last computer term: the Internet.
This may be, out of the three terms I've been talking about, the one that is most mis-used.
Here's the thing: the Internet contains BOTH the Web AND email.
But many many people, probably most people in fact, talk as if the Internet was a separate thing from email or the web, when in fact the web and email are both just *parts* of the Internet.
Or another way to put it is that the web and email are just certain ways of looking at all of the information that's available on the Internet as a whole.
The Internet is really just a big "network" of interconnected computers that talk to each other and share information. Some of it is presented as web pages, some of it as email, and so on.
But the Web and email are both part of the Internet, and not two separate things.
Hope that helps make sense sense of some computer terminology that can be confused pretty often.
Worth Godwin is a computer coach with over 13 years experience helping computer users in Plain English. He's also worked "in the trenches" as a hardware and software tech, solving real-world computer problems.
Worth has an easy email newsletter that you can join now for free. When you join, he'll send you free computer tips, translate basic computer terminology into plain English, and share easy audio and video computer lessons with you for free.
You can start getting free lessons immediately by just typing in your name and email address below right now:
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