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 flatfooted when your first-grader comes home and asks whether he can download a program from the Internet.
If you really want to drive your techie friends nuts, the next time you have a problem with your computer, tell them that the hassles occur when you're "running Microsoft." They won't have any idea if you mean Windows, Office, Word, Outlook, or any of a gazillion other programs.
A program is software that works on a computer. Windows, the operating system, is a program. So are computer games, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word (which is the word processor part of Office), Internet Explorer (the Web browser in Windows), the Windows Media Player, those nasty viruses you've heard about, that screen saver with the oh-too-perfect fish bubbling and bumbling about, and so on.
A special kind of program called a driver makes specific pieces of hardware work with the operating system. For example, your computer's printer has a driver; your monitor has a driver; your mouse has a driver; Tiger Woods has a driver.
Sticking a program on your computer, and setting it up so that it works, is called installing.
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 of these terms mean the same thing. If the program stops with some sort of weird error message, you can say it crashed, died, cratered, croaked, went belly up, GPFed (tech-speak 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, you can say the program 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 right far too often.) Admiral Grace Hopper 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, with the annotation "1545 Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found."
The people who invented all of 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.
And then you have wizards. Windows comes with lots of 'em. They guide you through complex procedures, moving one step at a time. Typically, wizards have three buttons on the bottom of each screen: Back, Next (or Finish), and Cancel (see Figure 1). Wizards remember what you've chosen as you go from step to step, making it easy to experiment a bit, change your mind, back up, and try a different setting, without getting all the check boxes confused.
Figure 1: The Add Printer Wizard helps you connect printers to your computer.
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