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PC Annoyances
How often do you sit down for a relaxing session at your PC, only to discover you can't find that file you saved six months ago but forgot the name of it. Or to go into Word and realize several dreary tasks could mre easily be put into macros if only you knew how? Or you decide to browse the Web only to be "attacked" by pop-ups and extra windows? AAUGHH!
This book deals with the folk who use Windows and PC's. I realize there are those who loathe Windows ("Linux rools d00d!") and point to the chapter on Windows annoyances as an example of an OS gone terribly wrong. However, until the day comes that everyone uses Linux (or finds a way around Billy Boy's "evil empire"), we're stuck with it. But I digress.
The book's several chapters are divided into specific topics, like E-mail, Windows, the Internet, MS Office, Windows Explorer. Music, Video & CDs, and last but not least Hardware. And yes there's a few suggestions and software for dealing with spam. Spam spam, spam, spam, wonderful spammmmm...not! Also mentioned are items like turning off return receipt (who cares whether or not your sender received your message, it got sent didn't it?), embedded images in email, and so on. There are also sections on dealing specifically with flaws in Outlook Express, Eudora, AOL, and Hotmail.
One thing that bummed me a little personally was that the chapter on Windows annoyances for the most part are for Windows XP. In fact, the author strongly recommends, in fact almost implores you, gentle reader, to switch from Win 98 to XP. In spite of my system running slowly and sometimes crashing (and the fact that I'm rather broke these days), I'll stick with my 98 for now. Of course, one could point out if previous versions of Windows had been created "right" or "ran correctly," there wouldn't be need for a whole chapter (or even reams of books) on Microsoft fixes or how to get it to run properly.
The Internet chapter deals with getting rid of pop-ups while browsing, and introduces a nifty tool for checking dead links on your bookmarks. It's quite annoying to save a page on your favorite band or obscure sport and then discover three months later it's disappeared. Also mentioned are a few "tricks" with using Google and even AOL IMs, like making AOL IM an "ad-free" zone. In fact, several tricks in this book are centered on cutting down the amount of on-line advertising we all seem to be bombarded with.
MS Office ... ah yes, Office. What would we ever do without it? What can we do with it? Among other tips, the author describes ways of "outfoxing" Word's Auto Correct feature (but gee, Mr Word officer, I swear that's the way rutabaga is spelled!) and my personal favorite: getting rid of Clippy -- Yeah! Also mentioned are some nifty tricks for using Excel and Power Point.
Windows Explorer ... ah yes, Windows Explorer. Not bad, but it could be better. And the author points us to two alternatives to Explorer: Power Desk and Total Commander, two inexpensive utilities that do everything WE does and more. However, if you insist on staying loyal to WE, there are some nice tips here about dealing with it.
The last two chapters discuss ways of making it easier to listen to tunes on your PC, watching video streams, and recording audio from any source. But most importantly, the author advises that if you share CDs with others to use 74-minute CDs because not all CD ROMs are created equal. The 80-minute CDs may get cranky if they're put in an old CD ROM that won't read them.
Last but not least, the Hardware chapter touches upon such wondrous things as "The Wonders of a Modem Reset," "tuning up your monitor," and also a way to keep that color ink printing cartridge you just bought to last more than two weeks, just by switching your prints to the lowest quality for most of your work. When you're broke like myself, those $50 printer cartridges add up fast!
I've just touched upon a few tips here ... the book has many more, all designed to be very helpful to the PC user.
The back inside cover has a place where the CD with all these nifty utilities should be, except O'Reilly decided to save a few bucks on the book's cost by pointing to a URL and telling we gentle readers to go there to get the utilities. Alas, I'm lazy and impatient (not to mention being too damn cheap to get a DSL line) so I haven't gotten around to getting most of the utilities yet. My bad. I've gotten used over the years to books that had the CD that I could just slide into my drive and install away. I have however so far gotten SpyBot, AMDeadLink, and MailWasher. Great stuff, and I do plan to download at least a few more of these utilities. Of course, the web site where you download all this stuff is a great plug for PC World.
The "enlightened ones," as I mention, won't need to bother with this book, as they have Linux, or a Mac. But the rest of us, who do battle with our PCs daily, will get a lot of useful information out of this book.
You can purchase PC Annoyances from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to submit a review for consideration, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
VeryGeekyBooks has more reviews of this book.
Do you really need to buy a book to figure out how to uncheck the "Office Assistants" checkbox in the list of available modules during the install of Office?
er.. that information would be in the title of the window that says "This program is not responding"...
Actually it's true that people simply do not read dialog boxes - one of our support guys was called out yesterday after a user complained that her computer kept giving an error every time she shut down this new program she has.
The "error" was a dialog box that said "Are you sure you want to quit?"
And those not responding processes that Windows can't close are fun too, like if the Visual Studio .NET IDE crashes, I've ran into situations where you can't close it from the task manager, it's still there and using 99% cpu if you log off and log back on, and you must flip the switch to shut down your PC.
Also exciting are the local Access Denied messages you sometimes get when logged in as Administrator, which can get in your way when trying to close a misbehaving process.
I can't stress enough how badly you want to download PStools
This will allow you to view hidden processes that Windows does not normally expose to the task manager, and kill just about anything, even the normal "access denied" processes.
Every windows admin needs this.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
1) I just installed Debian this weekend. A lot of USB devices are detected automatically in Debian. From experience RedHat is much better at this though. There is a very useful program in Debian called modconf, you can use it to load drivers(modules) very easily. :)
2) My firewire dvd burner worked like a charm in RedHat 9.0 Haven't goten it to work right in Debian yet. RedHat automatically set it up for me,
3) A good windows emulator is WINE, evern though the name means Wine is not a emulator, go figure.
4) There are several good WinAmp replacements, xmms, zinf and the mplayer(also plays just about any video format you can throw at it)
5) I just use one network connection right now, so I'm not so sure about that part. I have goten a wireless card to work really well under RedHat.
6) I've heard theat Evolution is a good replacement for Outlook, but I've never used it. There is a program for Linux you can buy called CrossOver Office that uses wine to make Office run well in Linux, I think you can also run QuickTIme and some other programs with it.
I'm still getting new to Debian, apt-get is really nice as is apt-cache search nameOfProgram. I am having some problems getting all of my hardware to work in it though and avoid dselect like the plague if you switch to Debian. I've had the most experience with RedHat. I switched to Debian because RedHat is droping support for RedHat 9.0, they did however release Fedora, which is pretty much RedHat 10 except I think it doesn't have RedHat Network(Like Windows Update for RedHat),but I could be wrong on that point.
-End Of Rant
Backspace key in Internet Explorer goes back a page, and promptly trashes the contents of whatever form you were filling out before you clicked in the wrong place.
Now WHOSE bright idea was that?
Can you spell your name and remember a password? If so you can install Knoppmyth, a fully installable Knoppix(debian) distro with mythtv. Knoppmyth is a pvr, has tv with a guide to your local cable/sat provider, weather, news, a dvd playing, an mp3 player (and indexing, by group and album, with visualizations), cd ripper with artist and title lookup, emulator frontend, and vcd player.
-dameron