Lesson 9: Start Up/ Shut Down and the Concepts of Privacy While Using a Computer

Lesson 9: Start Up/ Shut Down and the concepts of privacy while using a computer

AIM

In this lesson you will learn:

How to start up a computer

How to start and close a session

LESSON OUTCOME

After you have studied this lesson, you will be able to:

Switch on and off the computer in the right manner

We already now know that computer is a machine which runs on electricity. The CPU, monitor the mouse all needs electricity. The 'Power' button on the CPU is used to switch on a computer.

How to Start up and login to a computer:

Press the 'Power' button on the CPU to switch on the computer.

If everything during the start up goes on fine, we get a screen which

looks similar to the one given below.

This is the window where the user should type in the 'User name'. After typing in the User name, the computer will ask you the password.

What is the user name and password? When a computer is used by more than one person, all the users are given a user name and password to access it. The computer is not intelligent to recognize the user by itself. The user name and password ensures that only those whohave permission to use the computer are using it.

Generally, these are given by computer lab in-charge to the user. However, the user has the freedom to change the password after logging into the computer. These user name and password are case sensitive, that is small and capital letters are recognised.

There are some Precautions to be taken while choosing a user name and password:

User name should be easy to remember and in lower case.

For the sake of privacy, password should not be similar to user name. However, it must be easy to remember.

User name is mandatory but password is optional. That is, a user can choose to login without entering password.

Everybody can know the user name, but the password should be kept secret.

When both the user name ans password are typed in correctly, you can login to the computer and you can see the Desktop.

If either or both the user name and password are incorrect, the user will not be able to log in. The computer will again ask you to enter a valid user name and password.

How to Shut down/ Logout from the computer

You can log out from the computer using the icon(see the figure below) on the task bar.

When you click this icon a dialog box as shown in the following figure appears.

Select 'Log Out' option from this list. This will log you off from the computer.

To shut down a computer select the 'Shut down' option from the above dialog box. The electric supply to the computer should be switched off only after shutting down the computer.

Apart from this Icon we can access the log off and shut down options from the menu on the task bar. You can follow the path

System --> Quit