1. What is Windows (16:58)

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Welcome to Microsoft Windows Beginner Level 1, Lesson 1 brought to you by windowslearningzone.com. I am your instructor, Richard Rost. In this lesson, we're going to answer the question, what is Windows with a capital W? Then we're going to learn about Windows with a lowercase w. We'll talk about the history of the different versions of Windows, capital W again, and the different editions of Windows 11. If you aren't interested in any of this stuff and you want to skip the history lesson, go ahead and jump to lesson 2 and we'll talk about what's new in Windows 11.

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So what is Windows? Windows with a capital W is a specific software program. It's the name of an operating system developed by Microsoft. An operating system is an intermediary program between you, the user, and the computer hardware. It controls the various system resources like your CPU, memory, storage, and so on. Want to move the mouse pointer across the screen or click on something on the keyboard? That's handled by the operating system. Windows also runs other programs and gives programmers a common interface to work with. It makes it easier for them to write software. Otherwise, every person who designs something like a spreadsheet or a word processor app would also have to write the code to work with the mouse and the video display and all that. That would just be crazy and I used to write software back in the 80s and you had to do stuff like that. So the operating system brings all of that functionality together interfacing the user with the hardware. Every other piece of software that you're going to use from your word processor to your spreadsheet to your internet browser, they all rely on the operating system so you can talk to the hardware. Windows with a lower case w refers to the little boxes on your screen that look like the actual windows. You can move them around and resize them and do all kinds of cool things with them. Here's one of the standard windows programs called calculator and it comes in a little window, right?

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You can move the window around the screen. You can resize the window. You can do all kinds of stuff with it So when you hear me referring to a window, that's what I mean the windows on the screen versus Capital W Windows the operating system, which is a specific software application. Got it. Makes sense. Okay Now there's a ton of different versions of Windows Windows the operating system goes way back to 1985 and yes, I do remember the original I'm I'm I'm old Now every couple of years Microsoft makes a new version of Windows with new features as of today It's currently April of 2023. The latest version is Windows 11, let's hop in our DeLorean and take a trip back to the Stone Age. Alright, back in the old days when I was a kid, and we're talking like prehistoric times here, you pretty much had to be a nerd to understand how to work with the operating system. The interface was command line only, so you had to know a bunch of cryptic commands in order to get the computer to do pretty much anything.

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Here's an old screenshot of MS-DOS 3.3, that stands for Microsoft Disk Operating System. And it literally was just an interface between you and the files on the hard drive. If you wanted to move files around or rename them and stuff like that, you had to know the commands. If you wanted to start a program, you had to type the name in. Yeah, we're going back now.

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Realizing that only nerds were using computers, Microsoft decided to try to make it a little more user friendly so everybody could use a computer. So a few years later, Microsoft came out with Windows. Now at first, Windows was just another program that ran on top of DOS. It gave a pretty graphical user interface to allow non-nerds to be able to work with a computer. It's very limited by today's standards, but back in the day, it did the job. Windows 3.1 added things like TrueType fonts, where everybody had the same set of fonts, multimedia support so your computer could read things like CDs that were new at the time, and built-in networking capabilities.

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In 1995, Microsoft completely revamped Windows and called it Windows 95. It was a complete redesign from earlier versions of Windows and your computer started right up into Windows 95 you didn't have to load up DOS first and then DOS loaded Windows They added the start button Plug-in play support so you could just insert most devices like a mouse and it would just work a lot of us in the industry Called it plug-in prey because it usually didn't work Windows 95 added long file names, so you didn't have to use the old 8.3 standard. 32-bit architecture which was new. Internet Explorer having the web browser built into the operating system.

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That actually caused a bunch of ruckus at the time. And of course they added the taskbar. A lot of things we take for granted today in Windows originated with Windows 95. Next, a couple of years later, Windows 98 came out. This was one of my personal favorites at the time windows ninety eight was a huge improvement in ninety five which ninety five a lot of bugs in it so windows ninety eight iron those out it had a lot of upgrades improve performance automatic updates were added the fat thirty two file system for larger hard drives before that windows only went up to two gigabytes your hard drive space imagine that today two gigabytes i've got songs that are longer than 2 gigabytes. Now Windows 95 and 98 were still just pretty graphical interfaces sitting on top of DOS, the disk operating system. They still relied on that MS-DOS underneath in order to run.

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One of the first versions of Windows that truly was an actual operating system was Windows NT and he stood for new technology. There was both a server and a workstation version available. Windows NT was pretty much designed for business users. It wasn't really marketed for the home user. Business users wanted extra security and stability, and it was more of a high-end operating system. I had a Windows NT server myself in my office, and the thing never crashed. It was constantly up.

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It was running all the time. It was very reliable. And Windows NT was built around networking. Next came my personal favorite operating system at the time Windows 2000. I used Windows 2000 up until about 2013 so that's really a testimony to how well it was built. Again Windows 2000 was more of a business operating system designed with security and stability in mind. It had both a server and a workstation version. Windows 2000 took the business stability and security of NT and added a lot more compatibility and functionality From the consumer version Windows 98 that Windows NT was missing like plug-and-play support So they tried to merge everything into one operating system Then came Windows me the Millennium Edition It was awful. It was unstable. It was junk I had a few clients that I actually rolled back from Windows Me back to 98 or 2000.

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So we will never speak of Windows Me again. Next came Windows XP with its pretty green start button. Windows XP of course the XP standing for experience was marketed both toward business and home users. Microsoft merged a lot of the features of both Windows 2000 and Windows 98 together and produced a single operating system for both home and business users. XP was a favorite for gamers for its wide support of different video architectures. XP added a more polished user interface, fast user switching, Windows Media Player 8 was included which included CD burning, you can actually burn your own CDs without extra software. It included remote desktop so you could be a remote worker way back before that was popular and it added built-in support for wireless networking for the first time. And there was Windows Vista in 2006. Now Microsoft did add a lot of cool new features to Vista but the operating system itself just had a lot of problems. If you ran Vista on a brand new machine it was okay. I in fact myself had a Vista laptop and it ran fine because it was brand new. But lots of people upgraded older versions of Windows to Vista and had tons of problems. It had this new Aero interface they called it with transparent window frames and 3D effects and it ran great on new computers. Problem is lots of people had it on old computers and it just lagged and crashed and it just wasn't good. Vista added the Windows Media Center so you can watch and record live TV. Then we get the Windows 7 and this was a good version.

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It seems like for a while there it was like every other version was a good version. Windows 7 was released in 2009. It was considered by most people, in fact today, to be one of the best versions of Windows ever. I liked it a lot. In fact, my main work computer ran Windows 7 until about 2017 or so. It was a great stable operating system, better resource management, better user interface, nice and clean. It added touch support if you could afford a touchscreen monitor back then. Yeah, I admit it, I sprang for one. It was a fun toy for a few weeks but that was just a gimmick. Give me a keyboard and mouse any day. All right, then we were back to a bad version. Windows 8 came out in 2012 and it was almost universally hated by everybody I knew.

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That's because Microsoft tried to take the traditional PC interface and treat every computer like a tablet. They assumed everyone would have a touch screen and it just didn't catch on. It was the default way the operating system started up, assuming you wanted a touch screen mode. So you had to click on the desktop icon, this little guy here, right? To switch to the traditional Windows desktop. Everyone hated it. It was replaced with Windows 8.1 a year later which brought back the start button, boot to desktop, and a more familiar Windows experience. Next came Windows 9. Nah, I'm just kidding. There was no Windows 9. Why was there no Windows 9?

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I don't know. Microsoft never made an official statement, but it's probably because there was already Windows 95 and 98 and they didn't want any confusion with Windows 9X something. Some people seem to think that it had to do with internal source code issues, looking for versions that started with 9. So who knows? So Microsoft jumped right from Windows 8 to Windows 10. Windows 10 was released in 2015, much better than Windows 8. In fact, I know a lot of people who skipped right from 7 to 10. In fact, Windows 10 was probably the most popular version and is still the most popular version used today.

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to stat counter as of March 2023 Windows 10 makes up 72% of the total user base. Windows 11 is gaining but it's only got 14 and Windows 7 still makes up 10%. I see there's still some Windows XP users probably gamers that are still hanging on. Now Windows 10 brought back the traditional start menu and added virtual desktops Cortana which is Microsoft's digital assistant, and it was quietly ushered into the background in Windows 11. We'll talk about that later. Windows 10 could easily switch between desktop and tablet mode depending on the device being used. They added the Edge browser, which replaced Internet Explorer.

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I love Windows 10. In fact, if I didn't teach this stuff and have to stay on top of the latest and greatest, I'd probably still be using Windows 10. If you've still got a Windows 10 machine and you're happy with it just stick with it it's great. If it ain't broke don't fix it right? So unless you need some of the new features in Windows 11 which we're going to talk about in the next lesson or if you're buying a brand new machine then I would just stick with Windows 10. Ain't nothing wrong with Windows 10 and in fact a lot of the stuff I'm going to show you throughout this Windows 11 course is still perfectly valid for Windows 10. That brings us to the current version. Again, it's currently April 2023, so you might be watching this, I don't know how many years in the future, but I know some of my old videos have been around for 20 some years. Windows 11 was released in 2021 and again we're going to talk about the new features in the next lesson, but in a nutshell it adds a redesigned user interface, new icons, rounded corners, Microsoft Teams integration which came very popular during the pandemic, new widgets, better touch support, enhanced performance, and a Microsoft Store overhaul where they want you to get your little apps from the Microsoft Store. All right what about Windows 12? Well as of right now again April 2023 there's no expected release date yet From what I'm reading around the interwebs. It's probably gonna be in the fall or late 2024 Microsoft has had a History of releasing a new version of Windows every three years or so since Windows 8 so probably next year Now in addition to the different versions of Windows it also comes in different flavors Additions whatever you want to call them.

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There's Windows Home, which is what most people have. It's fine for home users and small business users. I personally have Home myself. It's what I use. It lacks some of the advanced high-end features like BitLocker encryption and Hyper-V virtualization. And if you don't know what those are, don't worry about them. You probably don't need them. Now Windows Pro is for advanced users, which include those weird things I just mentioned plus remote desktop and the ability to join a domain. Don't worry about remote desktop I actually prefer Google Chrome remote desktop and I'll put a link to that down below. We've got a whole separate video showing you how to set that up. Windows Enterprise takes place in the 24th century on a starship piloted by jet... no I'm just kidding I'm kidding. Windows Enterprise adds even more crazy things that you probably don't need like device management, higher-end security, app locker, stuff that you'll find in a big corporate setting. And finally Windows 365 not to be confused with Microsoft 365 which replaced Office 365. Microsoft really likes these 365 terms and Microsoft 365 is now usually included with Windows 365. Okay that's crazy. What is Windows 365? Well, it's designed to let you run Windows in the cloud. So even if you have an old computer, like a Windows 7 computer, as long as you can get on the internet, you can log in remotely to Microsoft's server where your Windows 11 desktop lives and you have the same desktop all the time no matter where you log in from.

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You can even access it from something like a phone or a tablet. And it all runs over the internet and it's pretty cool i'll be doing a separate set of lessons on windows three sixty five later all right so that's it for lesson one coming up over the next couple of lessons we're gonna be talking about what's new in windows eleven and what's gone we're gonna be going over some pc terminology the start menu and lots lots more stuff so stick around thanks for watching if you want me to post more videos about Microsoft Windows, then be sure to like this video, subscribe to my channel, and post a comment down below.

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Let me know that you want more Windows videos. About 90% of what I teach is Microsoft Access Database Design, but I love teaching Windows, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and all those other topics too. But of course, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. So if you want more Windows training, make some noise. You can watch my entire Microsoft Windows Beginner Level 1 course absolutely free on my website and on my YouTube channel. It's over an hour long and covers all the basics. If you like Level 1 and want to learn more about Windows, visit my website at the link shown and you can get Level 2, which is another complete hour long course for just one dollar. Level 2 goes into a lot more depth and teaches you how to get the most out of Windows. Visit my website today for more information. Thanks for watching.

0:16:39
To learn more about Windows or any of the other topics I teach like Microsoft Access, Word, Excel and more, visit my website at WindowsLearningZone.com.