Tip #2: Learn to Run

EDIT: later today I realised and found out that on Windows Vista and Windows 7, you can use the Search box in the new Start menu to do *almost* everything you can do with the Run dialogue box. In other words, press the Windows key and type away whatever command you want (that's 1 keystroke less!). I am keeping this post because it still works with Vista and 7, is the only way in Windows XP, and because I spent a whole afternoon working on it (deleting it will make me feel deeply sorrowful)

The best way to improve computer literacy is by doing things fast. To be fast, you need to reduce moving your right (or left) hand back-and-forth between the mouse and keyboard when navigating around your operating system. When you can do more things using both hands on the keyboard, you will begin to notice a sort of "flow" in what you are doing, rather than being interrupted by the need to switch over to the mouse (and losing momentum).

Today, we'll learn how to Run (in Windows). To do this:

1. Press the Windows key + R
   (the Windows key is between your left Ctrl and Alt keys, or Fn and Alt keys on laptop keyboards)
2. Type in a command and press Enter

This is considerably faster than looking for the program that you want in the Start menu. Some commands to launch commonly used applications:

• notepad - Opens Notepad.
• mspaint - Opens Paint.
• calc - Opens Calculator.
• winword - Opens Microsoft Word.
• excel - Opens Microsoft Excel.
• iexplore - Opens Internet Explorer.
• firefox - Opens Mozilla Firefox.
  
• cmd - Opens a Command Prompt.

The Run dialogue box can also be used to open files or folders, provided that you know the exact path or location of that file/folder.

Example: to open the folder C:\Downloads, instead of going to My Computer > C: > Downloads

1. Press the Windows key + R
2. Type C:\Downloads
3. Press Enter

If I wanted to directly open a file named Song.mp3 in C:\Downloads:

C:\Downloads\Song.mp3

How about the Documents folder? On Windows Vista and Windows 7, you can just type Documents. Same goes for the Music (Music) and Pictures (Pictures) folders. In fact, you can directly type the name of any folder located in C:\Users\your-user-name and Windows will open it. These include the Videos folder (Videos) and the Desktop folder (Desktop).

On Windows XP, however, the Documents folder is called My Documents. So in the Run dialogue box, you type My Documents instead. And since the My Music and My Pictures folders are subfolders of My Documents, you need to type My Documents\My Music and My Documents\My Pictures instead too.

There are still many other tasks you can perform directly from the Run dialogue box, but I'll just highlight one more (which most of you should already know). ping is used to check if a website or IP address is reachable. To ping the website www.yahoo.com:

ping www.yahoo.com

A command prompt window should appear, and you should see something similar to the following:

Pinging www-real.wa1.b.yahoo.com [209.131.36.158] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 209.131.36.158: bytes=32 time=277ms TTL=52
Reply from 209.131.36.158: bytes=32 time=368ms TTL=52
Reply from 209.131.36.158: bytes=32 time=284ms TTL=52
Reply from 209.131.36.158: bytes=32 time=407ms TTL=52

Ping statistics for 209.131.36.158:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 277ms, Maximum = 407ms, Average = 334ms

You can see that Yahoo's server sent 4 replies back (the numbers tell you things like latency [or lag], but for most people it's jibberish). If a reply was not received, you will see:

Request timed out.

This implies that either Yahoo's server is not working at the moment, or there is something wrong with your Internet connection (poor connection or disconnected from the Internet).

To continuously ping www.yahoo.com (more than 4 times) until you manually close the command prompt, type:

ping www.yahoo.com -t

That sums up our tip for today. If there is a particular program or command that I left out, do drop me a comment.