Lesson One: Course Introduction

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!