Class Summary 3-20-2014

Thanks go out to our club president, Ron for taking over the class last week. And thanks for your concern about my wife, Dianne. I was able to make it to today's class and these are the few things I recall we touched on. If you can think of anything else, let me know.

I had added a new user to my laptop so I could demonstrate personalizing the desktop. Things like back background picture, screen savers, size of icons, screen size, and more.



Right-click on the desktop and you are given a series of options to choose from.
View allows you to select the size of the icons on the screen
Screen resolution lets you choose the size of the screen like 800 x 600, 1024 x 768
Personalize is where you go to set the background colors or images to display, and set the screen saver options. In the screen saver window you can set the timeout options like after how many minutes of inactivity the screen will shut off, or the hard drive, etc.

We saw how you can use a picture or image as your password in Windows 8. I looked into this and what happens is your picture displays and you click on three specific points on the picture to be allowed in. To set it up open Settings and under Sign-in options click the Create a picture password Add button. This will give you the option to choose any picture, and then define three gestures anywhere on the image.

Want to place a shortcut on your desktop to access a particular webpage? Open the page in your browser, then drag the address in the address bar to the desktop. A shortcut will be created for you. You can then click once on the shortcut and press F2 to rename it. Or you can right-click and select Rename.



Right-click on the desktop start button to set the defaults for Classic Shell. That is the 3rd party software that gives us the familiar desktop start menu and lets Windows 8.x boot to the desktop. Find it at http://classicshell.net. Click Settings.



I like the Classic with two columns style. I do not check the Replace Start Button box so the button remains the Windows 8 design. Under Windows 8.1 Settings you can choose to bypass the the Start Screen on boot and instead open the desktop view. Note: to get from the desktop to the Start Screen (the square blocks) just press Shift+Windows.

We touched on how to use the Paint program to add words to an existing picture or even to add a caption under the picture. Then we uploaded that picture to Facebook. Adding the picture to Facebook at the Status box lets you include a description of the image.

We also talked about printing a portion of a page, like just the recipe on a webpage. Select the portion you want to print and choose Print. Then on the Print dialog box select the Selection box. Only the selected portion will print. You do not see a preview of the results in IE, but you do in Chrome. Did not try it with FF.

You asked for a list of Keyboard Shortcuts. Here is a detail source at the Microsoft site:
http://www.microsoft.com/enable/products/keyboard.aspx

Some discussion on the Amazon Kindle at the end of class resulted in a decision to talk about Kindles and tablets next time.