users are no longer receiving support and updates for Windows 7 and are highly encouraged to upgrade to Windows 10.
WINDOWS 10 MOBILE, RIP
Generally, devices with screens smaller than 9 inches ran the other kind of Windows, known as Windows 10 Mobile. Yes, there were devices larger than 9 inches that used to run Windows 10 Mobile and 8-inch devices with the “real” Windows 10. The general argument went like this: If you don’t need to use the traditional Windows 7–style desktop, why pay for it? Windows 10 centers on the mouse-friendly desktop. Windows 10 Mobile sticks to the tiled world and is much more finger-friendly.
This book talks about Windows 10, not Windows 10 Mobile. Microsoft gave up and sold its Nokia business in May 2016. Also, the company stopped fixing bugs and providing updates for Windows 10 Mobile in December 2019. Today, no one sells smartphones or tablets with Windows 10 Mobile, and the platform is dead.
FIGURE 1-3: The worldwide market share of desktop operating systems — April 2019 – April 2020.
Windows was once the king of the computing hill. Not so anymore. This is good news for you — the Windows customer. Today, Microsoft is branching out to make software for smartphones and tablets of all stripes, and Windows 10 itself works better with whatever tablets and hybrid devices you might use. It’s a brave new Windows world.
A Terminology Survival Kit
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 whether he can install a Universal app on your computer.
Windows 10, 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 others.
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 version of Windows 10. By design, apps (which used to be called Universal Windows Platform, or UWP apps) should run on 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 10 in S mode (see the previous section).
Many drivers ship with Windows, even though Microsoft doesn’t make them. The hardware manufacturer’s 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’s responsible for the drivers, too. Sometimes you can get a driver from the manufacturer that works better than the one that ships with Windows. Also, keep in mind that device manufacturers offer updated drivers on their websites.
When you stick an app or 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 sort of 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.)
