Let's say that a brand new computer is a batch of plain dough - waiting to be flavored and baked into something useful. If we want to use this dough to make a delicious batch of chocolate chip cookies, we would need to "accessorize" this dough with chocolate chips and a little brown sugar. If we want to use this dough into in a warm loaf of sesame seed bread on the other hand, we'd need to "accessorize" the dough with yeast and sesame seeds. The severity of outside elements (smoking, humidity, pets, etc.) will ultimately determine how often you'll need to de-dust your machine. But as an average, you shouldn't need to perform this procedure any more than once or twice a year. The entire exercise should take no more than twenty minutes tops and once complete, you'll immediately see and hear the difference in your machine. In the not too distant past, Netscape converted its once commercial version of its Navigator web browser to open source. And today, open source is venturing into the commercial realm as well. At first thought, the idea of open source may sound just plain crazy to those who earn a living from software development. It keeps track of where things exist on a computer's hard drive as well. But perhaps most importantly for the end-user, the operating system is responsible for translating commands issued with a keyboard and mouse into binary code (010110101 stuff) that can communicate with a set of speakers, a printer, a scanner, and more. This article looks at some of the programs that are included with most new systems and then asks the reader to consider if they're sufficient. NotePad and WordPad. All Windows systems include the two text editors, "NotePad," and "WordPad." Notepad is a plain text editor while WordPad is a rich text editor. Using Computers It's Not Rocket Science These days it's strange to hear people say, "I'm just not computer literate," as computers have evolved from archaic scientific calculators to simple point-and-click type machines. We suspect that today's "computer illiterates" are people who haven't taken the time to experiment with such a machine.