When you run a program on your computer it will appear in a window on your desktop. This is the area that you will work in. You can have as many different windows open at any time, but you will soon see how cluttered and unmanagable your desktop can get.

In the top right of every window are the same three symbols. They are minimize, restore down/maximize and close. These are the key to making sure you can see what it is you want to on the screen.

But if the window is small, you have to keep scrolling it around to see the contents. This is a waste of time and can get very tedious keep moving back and forth, up and down, to look back or check on your progress.

To make the window as large as possible you can click on the second of the three buttons. This is the maximize button. As it's name suggests it maximizes the window to cover the entire screen, except for the Task Bar at the bottom, as you need this to keep track of any windows open underneath your now, full sized window. This button is the only one of the three that has two different states. When your window is fully maximized the second button shows the symbol for Restore Down. Two little boxes overlapping. This means that the window is indeed maximized and cannot be made any bigger. Clicking on the Restore Down button, returns the window to it's original unmaximized state. When you make the window smaller in this way, the button changes to show one bigger box. This is the maximize button, clicking it will make the screen as large as your desktop, and now you are back to where we first started. If you click on that second of the three buttons a couple of times, you very quicly see how it works.

The first of the three buttons on the top right is the minimize button. Clicking on this with your left mouse button will sort of 'put away' the window, onto your Task Bar. The program is still running but just hidden away in the task bar. To get it back so you can see it again, simply click the name on the Task Bar. The window will come back up to it's original size and position it was before you minimized it. Of course, if you minimize THIS window you are reading this in, you will have to restore it, before you can continue on.

The final button is the CLOSE button. It looks like an X. Clicking that will exit, or 'close' the program. Usually once you have finished with a program you can click this button to exit from it. If you have any unsaved work that you were doing with a program that you try to exit, most will ask you if you want to save your work before finally quitting out. The window disappears and you would have to go back to the Start Button to run it again. It will not completely shut down your computer, just that particular program, so you can open others without the computer becoming slow due to trying to run too many programs at once.

Instead of using the three buttons on the top right of each window, you can simply RIGHT CLICK on the program shown on the TASK BAR, to access these same functions in a menu. This is handy if for instance the edge of the window you want to control is just off the screen, or you have so many windows open you are not sure which it is just by looking at them on the desktop.

To control multiple windows in one go you can RIGHT CLICK on the TASK BAR and select options that arrange all your open windows in a different way at once. Tiled on screen so you can see all of them (but they will probably be all be very small in this case), or overlapping just so you can see the title bar of each one on the desktop. You can even select to minimize them all at once (putting them all onto the TASK BAR), so you can see your desktop again.