Well.....that's mighty ambitious. I could explain some of that to you, but this post would probably be 10 pages long. For starters, the "For Dummies" series is a wonderful place to start. It makes things very easy. Something like like "PCs for Dummies", or "WIndows for Dummies" would be good. Also look into into simple PC repair and upgrade books. They will get into good detail on how different pieces of hardware work. The 24 hours series, and the 21 days series are also very good. Everything in them is well-organized, so you can learn things in pretty much whatever order you want. I have a book on HTML from the 24 hours series, and I taught myself in about an hour with it, maybe less. I also have a 24 hours book on UNIX, and it makes a great reference for when I need to do work in the terminal in Linux. For things like security, "Hacking Exposed" is a wonderful book. Consider it your Bible. Of course, when it comes to teaching yourself computers, nothing beats first-hand experience. Get a junker machine, and go nuts with it. If you're curious about something, you can use that machine as the guinea pig without worry of causing harm to your main box.



There are lots of kinds of viruses out there. They range from simple batch files limited to little more than formatting your hard drive, to complex C programs that can do very interesting and creative (and also harmful) things. There's also the beloved trojan horse. There's nothing wring with writing viruses. I think it would be a good way to learn a programming language, and to be creative. There isn't even anything wrong with creating malicious viruses. The problem doesn't come into play until you try to distribute them.



Unfortunately, going through all the files in Windows to find out what they all do isn't really worth the time. There are far to many, and the odds of you having to work on them (with some exceptions, such as win.ini, boot.ini, hosts, and lmhosts) are minimal. If you want to do things like that, try Linux. Slackware would be a good distribution for something like that, but it's less than easy.



Just remember that the entire computing world doesn't revolve around Windows (although it can sometimes seem that way). There are other operating systems out there that are worth learning, such as Linux and BSD. Please don't be OSist. Give all operating systems an equal chance. Also, Linux and BSD are freeware and open-source, so they don't restrict you if you REALLY want to mess around with your settings, and you can obtain a free copy without breaking the law.