This week consisted of an introduction to the testout.com
course that is our instructional material for this college course.
There was an introduction to the various competencies that
the course is designed to teach, as well as possible certifications and the
merits of each.
Robb Tracy then demonstrated how to use the virtual hardware
and software that will be used in the lab portion of each week’s lesson. In the Windows 8 simulated environment, there
is a limitation that the Windows start key is not enabled, as it is intercepted
by the host operating system before it is transmitted to the simulated
environment.
The lesson then went on to discuss the differences between
the standalone, workgroup and domain environments. Workgroups are not scalable past about 15
users and become a nightmare to manage.
Domain environments are more expensive to set up, but are much easier
and more efficient to manager with more than a few users.
Robb Tracy also discussed the differences between using a local
user account and a Microsoft user account to authenticate user access and how
to switch between them in Windows 8 and 8.1.
He then explained how to use a domain user account to log into Windows 8.
The lesson then went on to discuss logging onto a Windows 7 system
and how to use the Windows 7 user interface, and then the differences in
approach using Windows 8 and Windows 8.1.
I am pretty familiar with how things are done in Windows 7,
and there are a significant number of differences in Windows 8 and Windows
8.1. It’s going to be challenging to
keep them all straight!
