"Windows 95 Survival Tips for Beginners"

What follows is a collection of beginner tips, appropriate for beginning Windows95 users.

Helpful Tips:

Right-click on everything. You can't really do any damage with the right mouse button in Windows95, because it's designed only to show a context menu (a list of options appropriate for the selected object). One of the options is usually Properties, which gives you access to lots of settings and information.
Drivers are important. A driver is a software program that's used to help your computer work with a particular piece of hardware, such as a sound card or scanner. Many problems and errors in Windows are caused by buggy or outdated drivers. If you're having trouble, make sure you contact the manufacturer to see if they have any newer drivers for your hardware.
Your mouse tells you what's happening. Look closely at your mouse cursor while you're moving it around - it's not always an arrow. For example, when you're dragging a file, Windows95 gives you a clue as to what's going to happen when you drop it depending on what's currently underneath the cursor.
Help is near. Pressing F1 in most situations will either display detaild instructions or breif descriptions of the controls. The help has a search feature, too, allowing you to find desired information by typing in a keyword.
Explorer is called Explorer for a reason. Don't be afraid to browse your hard disk. Look in all your folders, and try all the programs in the Start Menu. Explore!
Use Shortcuts. A shortcut is a little file that lets you open a program without having to find the program on your hard disk. You can make a shortcut for any program, document, drive, or folder by draging and dropping the icon onto the destkop with the right mouse button. See the next section for another use for shortcuts.
Edit your Start Menu. You can fully customize your start menu - don't bother with the Taskbar Settings, though. Open the Windows Explorer, and open the Start Menu folder under your Windows directory. All the files and folders inside the Start Menu folder are mirrored in the actual Start Menu. You can drag-drop program icons into the start menu folder, just as easily as making new folders by using the right mouse button.
The Desktop is a folder. The desktop is a folder (aka directory) on your hard disk, just like any other. It's located under your Windows directory (usually C:\Windows\Desktop\), and can contain files, folders, and shortcuts. The desktop is a good place to store newly downloaded files from the internet, email attachments, and other "recent" files.
ZIP files. You'll notice that Windows95 Annoyances, among other sites on the World Wide Web, allow you to download various types of software. More often than not, this software is compressed into a ZIP file. A single ZIP file can contain an entire directory of files, while only occupying a fraction of the disk space. This definitely helps to reduce download time, but you'll need to obtain the program used to deal with such files. DOS users can use PKZip 204g and Windows users can use WinZip to extract ZIP files.
Maintenance. Windows95 comes with two maintenance utilities, Scandisk and Disk Defragmenter. Scandisk is used to find and correct many types of errors on your hard disk, and Disk Defragmenter is used to "optimize" your files (rearrange them so they aren't broken up). Using each of these on a regular basis (such as once a week) will not only improve performance, but will decrease the likelyhood of a disk crash or other loss of important data.

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