The moment you choose to use a computer you have to allow your mind to always be expanding and accepting of the new methods available in your fingers. Now that Microsoft has told the world Windows 10 is the last Windows, we should embrace this and realize you might just be able to learn (almost) everything there is to know about your current computer.
Starting with the desktop: No, there should NOT be any program icons on the desktop. In fact I personally do not have anything on the desktop but a nice picture background that changes every hour. Everything I need to get to is either on the quicklaunch tray or pinned to my start menu. The idea of creating shortcuts and placing them on the desktop is fine, in theory, but when you get too many of them you will find yourself spending more time than if you were to just click on the start menu, not to mention if that shortcut were to be removed or simply moved to another part of your desktop... it's always about "time" when it comes to learning a computer and all the quirks that go with it. What you used to do with 3 clicks can now be done with 2 or even 1 and that saves you time. When Bill (Gates) set out to create windows, the 'desktop' was just that.. a desktop like the one you have at your home/work place. Some desks are littered with piles of books and papers whereas others are nice and neat with everything in its place. The idea of a work space where you worked through your day and then at the end of your day, placed everything back where it belongs is generally how windows desktop was intended. If you look back at earlier builds, the 'system icons' were those like "My Computer" and "My Documents" and even "My Pictures" and "My Music". The idea being you could work on a word document and save it to your desktop but at the end of your day you would simply drag and drop that icon in to your "my documents" folder. Even to this day when you go to save a file it typically defaults to opening the file save window to 'desktop' thus the theory it would be saved there initially but you would then drag it to the appropriate place later... great theory but unfortunately Bill forgot that humans are lazy asses and once it has been saved, it is generally forgotten about. 9 out of 10 problems of 'lost files' complaint that I have to deal with are due to people that have dozens, if not a hundred icons on their desktop and that is where they have been saving things to. The problem with this is that it is simply too easy to delete an icon which is not a shortcut, but the real deal. If you must have that document file on the desktop then create a shortcut within your documents and move it to your desktop, or use the RIGHT CLICK on the document and choose "send to desktop (create shortcut)" option.
With Windows 10, the 'pin to start' is a great feature and you can then move the icon to whatever location you want within the start menu and it will stay there until you move it. As well, you can group icons and even give that group a name so it doesn't have to be all that different than the desktop, only you won't be losing things. Probably the best part of the latest windows is the ability to just click on the start menu icon and start typing what it is you are looking for and it will provide you with a search result. Search is by far the most important feature of your computer and this is the one thing most people overlook. I am always hearing the complaint, "I can't find...." you have a document named "test project" and you know it is saved in your documents. So you could click on the start menu, then on the file explorer icon or the file explorer folder direct from the quick launch and then either go clicking through to your documents or quite possibly use the search window from the file explorer but remember what I said about "time" and the amount of clicks you are using... now try finding that same file by clicking on the start menu either with your mouse or by using the windows key on the keyboard and simply type "test project" .. in fact you probably only need to put in 'test' by the time the search results have found the document you are looking for.... pretty simple right! You can use this for anything.. files or programs or settings.. you want to turn off your computer, click on the start menu/windows key and type 'power' or 'turn off' viola! pretty amazing isn't it!
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