Antivirus program: These are programs that prevent viruses from infecting your machine. They also catch Trojan Horses. Some of these today purport to also protect you from Spyware. My experience has shown that most don't do very well at that, but there are a few that do. Please see separate entries for Virus, Trojan horse and Spyware, and the side bar at Virus.

Desktop: The desktop is the area that you see on your monitor (display, screen) when you first start your machine, before you click on anything, but when your machine is ready for you to do so. On your desktop you see small, labeled pictures, called icons. These represent programs you can start, or shortcuts to folders or documents. Along the bottom of the desktop is a special area called the Taskbar. On the very left of the task bar is the Start button, on the very right is the clock. You may have icons showing at various places in between. As you open programs, they are displayed as buttons on the taskbar, and you can look at the taskbar at any time to see what programs or windows you have open. In other words, you can see what tasks are running, hence its name. Please also see our article on The Parts of the Windows Desktop. *See Sidebar

Download/downloading: This is a frequently misused word. Downloading refers to the transfer of information from one computer to another. When you click on a link to a web page, that page downloads to your machine. When you click on a link for a program that you find on the internet, you are downloading the program. A lot of people use the word downloading to refer to copying data from a CD ROM and installing it on your machine. This is not really downloading. It is installing or copying. 

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