Microsoft ^® Windows ^® has continued to evolve into new and more complex beasts as the years have flown by. It's an operating system that has grown with hardware technology; technology which has both been the result of demand, and which has driven demand for better software to work it. The main successful commercial flavours of Windows have been WFW 3.11 (16-bit), and the 32-bit Win95, Win98 (and variant SE), NT3.51, NT4.0, Millennium, and Windows 2000... leading to the most recent brand name called Windows XP - Home, Professional, and now, Media Center Edition. (I know... by the time you've sussed out these little gems, there's another new one waiting around the corner.) These are the client operating systems, the ones which are most used by the likes of you and I, directly interacting with an environment in which imagination and patience is both stretched, tested and confounded. In addition to these clients are the servers - those specialised operating systems which field requests for data by the bucket load, via a network as simple as a small business office, and as complicated as a data warehouse nestled on a main tributary of an Internet backbone, serving the electronic requests of millions. The servers are even more complex, clever and potentially confusing than the one sat in your study, bedroom or garage. We won't worry about those here (but if you're interested, give us a shout!)

Although the pace of technology never seems to slow down, there is a middle zone of users who represent the bulk of usage - neither at the cutting edge nor living in the archaic past in the museum of invention. The second-hand market is still vibrant with deals and bargains, and with new machines, you get vastly more capability for your bucks than you did a mere 3 years ago. Computers are a bit like dogs ~ a year in human terms seems like 7 to a computer, and both dogs and computers are likely to make a mess on your floor (hint: get a CD storage unit, and some cable ties!) Whether you're struggling along with a terribly confused Windows 95 on a snail-paced Pentium 233MHz (!), or whizzing along with a brand new 3.8GHz P4 570 running WinXP Media Center - or, more likely, somewhere in between -TechScope can help you get to grips with it in no time. Well, not no time! But sooner than you would be if you strained at all the Help files on your machine that you didn't even know existed.

If you're new to modern PCs, and new to Windows, you'll not be short of advice from those who have been at it for years. And, no doubt, there will be the odd gem of wisdom along the way. Unfortunately, Windows of any flavour remains both an over-simplified and an over-complicated piece of kit 'out of the box'. Yet again, it boils down to what's useful to you, and this may yet be something that needs to be discovered by you, not relayed as a passing thought from a neighbour who hasn't quite caught your gist. TechScope tuition concentrates on genuine discovery, and it is this which will enhance your ability to retain the information, and let it grow into other areas of your computing activity. Before you know it, expertise is just around the corner, and all yours for the price of a little effort and a lot of fun.

Some of the learning areas of Windows covered include:

• The basic interface -why the screen shows what it shows, and why your mouse clicks do what they do
• The operating system - its files, its structure, its 'temperament' and both its basic robustness and inherent delicacy
• Windows' relationship to the hardware components on your system - device drivers and their settings
• How to protect and update its core functionality
• How to install and uninstall programs, whilst considering the implications of doing so
• Original data of your own - where and how to store it, how to get hold of it again, how to make safe copies and how to transfer it from one place to another, as well as how to transform it into something altogether more impressive
• Recovery techniques, of both Windows itself and your data
• Upgrading Windows, or installing a completely fresh one on a blank hard disk, with ways of having more than two different types of Windows on your PC, maybe one for games, and one for business (hint: there is a very good reason for doing this!)

There are many more important aspects implied by this short list. With TechScope, you'll go as advanced as you want to go, and no further. Either way, you'll never look back, and eventually start to wonder what all the fuss was about.