Windows 11 All-in-One For Dummies. Ciprian Adrian Rusen

July 2021, Windows had a market share of 73 percent of all desktop operating systems, and macOS had 15 percent. In Microsoft’s world, Windows 10 is king with a 78 percent market share. Windows 7 is a distant second, with 16 percent, a value that is constantly declining because Microsoft declared its end of life on January 14, 2020. Users are no longer receiving support and updates for Windows 7, and they are highly encouraged to upgrade to Windows 10 or Windows 11. The graph doesn't include a market share for Windows 11 because it hadn't been launched. I expect it to reach levels similar to Windows 10 in just a couple of years.

      

If you look at the bigger picture, including tablets and smartphones, the numbers change dramatically. As of July 2021, StatCounter says that 42 percent of all devices on the internet use Android, while 30 percent use Windows. Mobile operating systems are swallowing the world — and the trend has been in mobile’s favor, not Windows. The number of smartphones sold every year exceed the number of PCs sold. According to Statista, in 2020, 54 percent of all internet traffic was made from mobile devices. And the data trends repeat the same story.

Understanding Important Terminology

      Some terms pop up so frequently that you’ll find it worthwhile to memorize them or at least understand where they come from. That way, you won’t be caught flat-footed when your first-grader comes home and asks to install TikTok on your computer.

      

If you want to drive your techie friends nuts the next time you have a problem with your Windows 11 computer, tell them that the hassles occur when you’re “running Microsoft.” They won’t have any idea whether you mean Windows, Word, Outlook, OneNote, or any of a gazillion other programs. Also, they won’t know if you’re talking about a Microsoft program on Windows, the Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android, or even Linux.

      Windows 11, the operating system (see the preceding section), is a sophisticated computer program. So are computer games, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word (the word processor part of Office), Google Chrome (the web browser made by Google), those nasty viruses you’ve heard about, that screen saver with the oh-too-perfect fish bubbling and bumbling about, and more.

      An app or a program or a desktop app is software (see the earlier “Hardware and Software” section in this chapter) that works on a computer. App is modern and cool; program is old and boring, desktop app or application manages to hit both gongs, but they all mean the same thing.

A Windows app is a program that, at least in theory, runs on any edition of Windows 11. By design, apps (which used to be called Universal Windows Platform, or UWP apps) should run on Windows 11 and Windows 10 on a desktop, a laptop, and a tablet— and even on an Xbox game console, a giant wall-mounted Surface Hub, a HoloLens augmented reality headset, and possibly Internet of Things tiny computers. They also run on Windows 11 in S mode (see the preceding section). Here's a neat trick that’s available only in Windows 11: It can install and run Android apps too, but only through the Microsoft Store. I talk more about this topic in Book 5, Chapter 1.

      

For most people, Universal Windows apps don't mean what they might think it means. Universal Windows apps don’t work on Windows 8.1 or Windows 7 for example. They’re universal only in the sense that they’ll run on Windows 11 and Windows 10.

      

A special kind of program called a driver makes specific pieces of hardware work with the operating system. The driver acts like a translator that enables Windows to ask your hardware to do what it wants. Imagine that you have a document that you want to print. You edit the document in Word, and then you click or tap the Print button and wait for the document to be printed. Word is an application that asks the operating system to print the document. The operating system takes the document and asks the printer driver to print the document. The driver takes the document and translates it into a language that the printer understands. Finally, the printer prints the document and delivers it to you. Everything inside your computer and all that is connected to it has a driver: The hard disk inside the PC has a driver, the printer has a driver, your mouse has a driver, and Tiger Woods has a driver (several, actually, and he makes a living with them). I wish that everyone was so talented.

      Windows includes many drivers, some created by Microsoft and others created by third parties. The hardware manufacturer is responsible for making its hardware work with your Windows PC, and that includes building and fixing the drivers. However, if Microsoft makes your computer, Microsoft is responsible for the drivers, too. Sometimes you can get a driver from the manufacturer that works better than the one that ships with Windows.

      When you stick an app or a program on your computer — and set it up so that you can use it — you install the app or program (or driver).

      When you crank up a program — that is, get it going on your computer — you can say you started it, launched it, ran it, or executed it. They all mean the same thing.

      If the program quits the way it’s supposed to, you can say it stopped, finished, ended, exited, or terminated. Again, all these terms mean the same thing. If the app stops with some weird error message, you can say it crashed, died, cratered, croaked, went belly up, jumped in the bit bucket, or GPFed (techspeak for “generated a General Protection Fault” — don’t ask), or employ any of a dozen colorful but unprintable epithets. If the program just sits there and you can’t get it to do anything, no matter how you click your mouse or poke the screen, you can say that it froze, hung, stopped responding, or went into a loop.

A bug is something that doesn’t work right. (A bug is not a virus! Viruses work as intended far too often.) US Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper — the intellectual guiding force behind the COBOL programming language and one of the pioneers in the history of computing — often repeated the story of a moth being found in a relay of an ancient Mark II computer. The moth was taped into the technician’s logbook on September 9, 1947. (See Figure 1-4.)

      Source: US Navy

      FIGURE 1-4: Admiral Grace Hopper’s log of the first actual case of a bug being found.

      The people who invented all this terminology think of the internet as being some great blob in the sky — it’s up, as in “up in the sky.” So, if you send something from your computer to the internet, you’re uploading. If you take something off the internet and put it on your computer, you’re downloading.

      The cloud is just a marketing term for the internet. Saying that you put your data “in the cloud” sounds so much cooler than saying you copied it to storage on the internet. Programs can run in the cloud — which is to say that they run on the internet. Just about everything that has anything to do with computers can be done in the cloud. Just watch your pocketbook.

      

If you use cloud storage, you’re just sticking your data on some company’s computers. Put a file in Microsoft OneDrive, and it goes onto one of Microsoft’s computers. Put it in Google Drive, and it goes to Google’s storage in the sky. Move it to Dropbox, and it’s sitting on a Dropbox server.

When you connect computers and devices to each other, you network them. The network