Project 1.1 

Hands-On Project 1.1: Exploring the Components of the Windows 10 OS 

Time Required: 20 minutes

 Objective: Explore Windows 10 components. 

Required Tools and equipment: A Windows 10 computer or virtual machine

Description: In this project, you explore Windows 10 components by using some Windows system tools. 

1. Sign in to your Windows 10 computer with an administrator account. 

2. You’ve just used one important OS component—the user interface. While everything you do on a computer demonstrates the progression of input, then processing, and then output, let’s try some other obvious examples. For instance, right-click Start and click Windows PowerShell to start a PowerShell session. PowerShell is like a command prompt except that it’s more powerful. Type 25*25 and press enter. PowerShell returns the result of 625. PowerShell reads your input, processes it, and produces the output.

3. Try a more useful PowerShell function. Type Get-ComputerInfo and press enter. (Capitalization is not important in PowerShell commands.) This time, the processing takes a little more time and the output is extensive. PowerShell tells you just about everything you want to know about your computer, including information about the processor, BIOS, and process. To see the output page by page, type Get-ComputerInfo | more and press enter. The | more part of the command sends the output to a program called more that paginates the output. Press <Space> to proceed to the next page or q to quit. Type Get-Command and press enter to see the long list of commands available in PowerShell. Close the PowerShell window.

4. Right-click Start again to see a list of administrative tasks that are particularly important to an IT administrator or computer technician. Click System. The System command loads the Settings app, and you see a summary of your computer configuration in the right pane, including the processor, RAM, and Windows version. The left pane shows a list of settings categories. Close the Settings window.

5. Right-click Start and click Device Manager to see a list of I/O devices. Double-click Processors to see the type, speed, and number of processors installed.

6. Click the View menu and then click Resources by connection to see how the devices are using memory and interrupts. Double-click Interrupt request (IRQ) to see interrupt information, and then scroll down and double-click Memory to see how devices are using memory. The details of what you see aren’t important unless you have to troubleshoot a conflict or you are writing device drivers for Windows. Close Device Manager.

7. Right-click Start and click Disk Management to see details about the installed storage on your computer.  Close Disk Management.

8. Right-click Start and click Computer Management. This tool contains a collection of other system tools, such as Device Manager and Disk Management, so you can manage much of the computer from a single tool. Click to expand Services and Applications and then click Services. You see a list of installed services and their status. Click the Status column heading twice to sort the services by status and bring the Running services to the top of the list. Close Computer Management.

9. Right-click the taskbar and click Task Manager. Click in the Type here to search box, type notepad, and press enter. Move the Notepad window so you can see Task Manager. Click More details at the bottom of Task Manager. Under the Apps section, you see Notepad and Task Manager and then many processes under Background processes.

10. Right-click Notepad and click Go to details. The Details tab opens and notepad.exe is highlighted. You see its process ID (PID), status, amount of memory used, and other information. With notepad.exe highlighted, click End task. Click End process when prompted; the Notepad window closes and the process is no longer listed in Task Manager. Occasionally, you may have to use Task Manager in this way to terminate a hung process. Close Task Manager.