We had to make a few educated guesses about you, our audience, when we started writing this book. Perhaps your computer is solely for personal use—e-mail, surfing the Internet, playing games, and so on. Perhaps your work allows you to telecommute. Or maybe you run a small home-based business. Taking all these possibilities into account, we assumed that either you’d be using a stand-alone home computer or you’d have two or more computers connected so that you could share files, a printer, and so on. We also assumed that you have an Internet connection.

Another assumption we made is that—initially, anyway—you’d use Windows Vista just the way it came, and that your computer is capable of using all of Windows Vista’s features, meaning that your computer supports the Aero glass transparent appearance. Also, although we assumed you’d be using your mouse to execute commands and navigate around your computer, we know that many people prefer to accomplish just about every task by using the keyboard only.

If you decide to change Windows Vista’s appearance—by reverting to the look of a previous version of Windows, for example—or to hide some screen elements and display others, you can quickly and easily customize almost everything. However, because Windows Vista’s default setup makes accomplishing your work so easy—and because our philosophy is that work should be as stress-free and pleasant as possible—that’s what we’ve shown in the procedures and graphics throughout this book.