If you've worked with Microsoft Word, you're familiar with the same basic pattern: type some text via keyboard, copy and paste with the mouse, type more text, move the cursor back a paragraph with the mouse, type yet more text, spell check using the mouse on the main menu etc.

Working within Microsoft Windows may not be everyone's cup of tea. Long ago, before windows and scrollbars and maximizing and minimizing, a user could only type commands into a shell to get a computer to do anything.

Many users are familiar with msconfig, the utility that lets you configure which programs and services run at bootup and login. Many applications install services and programs that run when you boot up or login into Windows; many of these behind-the-scenes programs never show their face and are unknown to users.

The Windows Task Manager is a useful little utility that gives you a lot of information about your running applications and services. It also allows you to view performance statistics, such as memory and CPU usage.

Do you ever wonder how your web browser magically displays web pages? Or how Google miraculously returns millions of search results in a fraction of a second? It all boils down to efficient code.

The more applications you have running simultaneously, the more you have to juggle them on your desktop; it's cumbersome and time-consuming if you're a user that constantly multi-tasks between windows. It can also become confusing if you have more than five windows open at the same time.

Multiple downloads of a large file from a single server can be frustratingly slow, as the server must divide its time among all downloaders at the other end. A better way to distribute large files is to use the BitTorrent protocol.

Apple's iTunes is fantastic at playing music and is your iPod's bestfriend--they work and play together very nicely. One of the problems with iTunes, though, is that it only does one-way transfers.

For many developers, manipulating an HTML document by using JavaScript and the DOM (document object model) can seem like a pain in the neck. It takes a lot of raw JavaScript just to make a web page do a trivial trick that might have left an impression back in the early days of the web but nowadays looks commonplace and tired. If you want to make your web pages act and move like desktop applications, then it's hard to avoid using JavaScript.