If all goes well, and most of the time it will, the first display you will see on your monitor after you turn on the PC is called the windows Desktop. Think of it as your home base. It has little pseudo pictures on it called icons. An icon is a pictorial representation of something which is supposed to suggest the thing the icon deals with. However, as you will see with experience, some icons are unrecognizable.

Icons are used to make the use of a PC less technical. How do icons work? When you turn on your PC you see what is called the desktop. It displays a whole bunch of icons. Every PC is a little different so I'll just explain two that are common and important.

All icons cause the PC to do something when they are activated by clicking on them with the mouse. The picture shows two icons. The first, "My Computer", looks vaguely like a PC - if you have a broad imagination. When it is clicked, it displays more icons which indicate what equipment items are on the PC. Are you beginning to think the PC uses a lot of icons? You're right. Tons of them!

The other icon in the picture, "Recycle Bin", is a waste basket and even looks like one! You put files you don't want in the recycle bin. However they stay there and are not completely thrown away until you empty the recycle bin. Just like you do with any trash container in your home. While files are in the recycle bin, they can be retrieved and put back in to use, if/when you change your mind.

Now let's look to the bottom left of your desktop where you'll see the "Start" button.

This is the most important icon on the desktop. When you click ( once) on the start button you get the start menu. Start menus can be different but look something like the next picture.

From here on when I say click on something, you have to move the pointer (mouse or trackball, whichever you have), to the object I'm talking about, then press the left button either once or twice.

Clicking is either done once or twice. They are different. Clicking once usually selects the object you click on. Clicking twice, also called double click, causes some action to take place.

In PC talk, a menu is a list of files you can double-click to activate them.

In the start menu, pictured above, simply placing your mouse or trackball pointer over the areas with tiny arrow heads at the extreme right, will cause them to expand to show more menu items.

Try it without clicking any buttons just to get the feel of it.