Windows for People Who Use It Every Day

What's actually underneath Windows - the NT kernel, drive letters and the real folder layout, services and the registry, and PowerShell - explained for someone who's used Windows for years but was never shown the manual.

1. Windows Under the Hood Windows runs on the NT kernel; drive letters like C:\ map to volumes; programs live in Program Files while your settings hide in AppData; 'Run as administrator' is a user-space program asking the trusted side for permission; and Windows differs from Unix in backslashes, .exe files, and the registry instead of config files.
2. Services, Task Manager & the Registry Windows services are background programs that run without a window; Task Manager's Startup, Details, and End-task tabs let you see and control every running process; and the registry is a central settings database organized into hives, keys, and values that you edit carefully.
3. PowerShell Basics PowerShell is a modern shell whose big idea is that commands pass objects, not plain text; cmdlets are named Verb-Noun (Get-Process, Get-ChildItem, Stop-Process); you pipe objects from one cmdlet to the next; and running a script for the first time hits the execution-policy gotcha.