There
it sets. Santa brought a brand new binary buddy sporting the Windows 10
operating system. For some, opening the box, pulling out the PC and setting it
up will be child’s play. For some of us, it will seem as if Shakespeare himself
screams, “cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war.” (Martha, Shakespeare in a
computer column?) But let not the beast convey tribulation to a worried brow.
What
information should we gather prior to opening the box? Collect e-mail addresses
and passwords. Make sure we have the name of our wireless network and the
password if we are going to connect to the Internet wirelessly. For folks that use
Comcast, Centurylink, Verizon or other wireless modem/routers the SSID (network
name) and the password are usually located on a label on the modem. Those of us
that have our own wireless routers will have to find that hidden piece of paper
with the password written on it.
If
we have an e-mail address that ends in @msn.com, hotmail.com, live.com, or
outlook.com then half the battle of setting up the computer is done. If we
don’t have one of these don’t worry we have choices.
It’s
time to turn on the new computer. Windows will go through a series of questions
before taking us to the desktop for the first time. It will ask us what Country,
language, and keyboard layout we want to
use, and to accept the Microsoft License Agreement.
Note,
if we don’t accept the agreement the computer won’t work.
Next
it will ask us to sign into the PC with a Microsoft ID which would be one of
the addresses ending with the extensions mentioned before. Don’t have a
Microsoft e-mail address? There are three choices, create a new Microsoft
account using our existing e-mail address, create a new Microsoft address or to
set up the computer without a Microsoft account. Each choice suffers pros and
cons.
Creating
a new Microsoft e-mail address ending in a Microsoft domain is my preferred
method. We can also use our existing e-mail address as the user name for our
new Microsoft account. The dilemma is that we can confuse one with the other.
Example, our regular e-mail is abc@comcast.net with a specific password. We can
use abc@comcast.com as our Microsoft username as well with the same password.
Good so far. However the day will come when we change our Comcast password at
Comcast for our e-mail. However this doesn’t change our Microsoft abc@comcast.net
account password because that must be changed at Microsoft. So thinking that we
changed our password we try to log into our computer with the new password but
that isn’t the password for Microsoft
and we can’t login. Finally we can choose to skip using a Microsoft
account and log in with what is referred to as a local account. This precludes using
Microsoft products, such as Skype, OneDrive, Mail, Cortana or others. But to
use one or all of the Microsoft Products we will have to create and or use a
Microsoft account.
Now
comes setting up our email, moving files from the old computer and installing
any programs we want.
My
head is spinning, more next week.
