Book Review: Windows Annoyances

Windows Annoyances
by David A. Karp
ISBN 1-56592-266-2
285 pages; softcover
O'Reilly & Associates, 1997
800/998-9938
www.oreilly.com
$29.95

Do you find yourself almost happy with Microsoft Windows? Do you feel that it would be just perfect if it didn't litter your desktop with unwanted icons, or if you could clear some of the unwanted garbage out of your Start menu, or if it didn't take so many steps to get to your favorite Control Panels?

Well, that's what Windows Annoyances is all about. The tag line on the front cover is, "Taking Charge of Win95 and WinNT 4.0." The author, David Karp, starts you out gently with an introduction to Windows basics and the differences between Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0. After a few pages of that, he launches directly into how to customize Windows so that it fits the way you work instead of the other way around.

The less technically-inclined may be lost in the guts of the registry and networking chapters, but the overviews are worth reading even for the determined technophobe. Unlike earlier versions of Windows, Win95, 98, and NT store just about all of the critical information about how the system is configured and how all the programs should work in one central local, called the registry. Understanding what it contains and how it works is critical to understanding Windows itself.

How about performance? Does your system feel more sluggish than it used to? Windows Annoyances devotes an entire chapter to fine-tuning the performance of Windows to get the most out of your system.

The real gem of the book is a chapter called Troubleshooting. You may never need it (you lucky dog, you), but if you ever do, it will pay for the book many times over. It can help you recover from a crash, deal with hardware problems, keep your hard disk running smoothly, and fix those quirky problems that Windows is famous for.

As to the question I'm sure is foremost on your mind: that critter on the front cover is a Surinam Toad. Each book in the O'Reilly computer series has a different animal on the front, and reading about that animal in the colophon in the back of the book is an interesting exercise in trivia.

This is not one of those books that you'll read once and toss on a shelf. You'll want to keep it next to your computer and refer back to it over and over. This one definitely gets a big ReporterCentral thumbs-up.