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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.
Or if they're really unlucky, they get the support the Win32 users.
[Or if they're really unlucky, they lose their job right before the holidays and don't even do that any longer. But I digress.]
To be fair, it's not like non-MS software is annoyance-free. =) One nice difference with Linux, Evolution, and all of the other OS software I use is that I can learn about the annoyances before I pony up my increasingly scarce cash for it....
One of my favorite dialogs from Windows is the one saying "This program is not responding". Excuse me but wouldn't it be nice to tell me which one that is? Obviously Windows knows which one it is. Arrrr!
TT
How about: I don't *like* other operating systems? That's the one concept that you Mac and Linux fanatics don't seem to get. In my experience, WinXP just *works*. I've used both Linux and OSX extensively, and WinXP is the only one I keep on coming back to. -1, Micro$oft Lover
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
I disagree. I would rather have my father try to do things on his own than call me all the time to fix it. Sure he makes mistakes that I have to fix every now and then, but at least he isn't calling me to make tiny simple tweaks every 5 minutes.
This is how I learned, I messed up my PC many o'time but I learned something each time I did it.
Be thankful at least your father isn't afraid of the computer.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
- being able to enjoy those cute "I love you" and "Anna Kurovina" messages automatically forwarded from your best friends, co-workers, and total strangers.
Anyone with half a brain and/or access to someone that can take the time to teach them a bit will be perfectly safe from such things.
- The ability to browse every site online, at least every one selling X10 cameras and pictures you wouldn't want your boss to see.
Funny, I don't see any ad pop-ups at all while i'm browsing with Firebird's blocking on, and everyone I know that's still using IE (even my computer-cluelesss grandma) has a pop-up blocker installed. I'll let you in on a little secret, too - those ads and porn pop-ups aren't limited to only Windows.
- Software so advanced it installs automatically while you browse, no user intervention required. Uninstalling is as simple as wiping your main partition and re-installing Windows.
This is a legitimate gripe. Again, however, anyone with half a brain or access to a help desk minion/techie friend or family member will be able to remove such software through programs like Ad-Aware or Spybot. I'm sorry, but if someone thinks the only way to get rid of ad/spyware is a complete wipe of the drive, then they're an idiot. Even for the stuff that can't be auto-removed somehow, there's almost always a fairly easy way to fix it in the registry, found through Google.
- Enjoy desktop environments where settings are spread around 3 different menus and where sometimes they inexplicably don't stick etc. etc. in general using software developed by investors free from the limiting boundaries of friendliness and caring about your users.
Way to generalize. And settings spread out in Windows? I think not. 99.9% of anything you need to change can be accessed through the Control Panels or a simple file search for something to edit.
- A wide swath of available content, all provided to your trusted platform ensuring that your purchased programs will run forever... Until you lose the disk, upgrade your system, ban the program from spying on your browsing habits, or the producer decides to turn the software off remotely.
True for some software, not true for the vast majority. I won't claim to know exactly what you do for a living, but you sound like the type that uses only (in Windows) MS Office, and maybe some development apps, along some small utilities - and you draw your opinions on Windows software behavior soley from that base. Please, feel free to respond and prove me wrong, though.
Don't get me wrong, i'm not saying Windows is perfect, i'm just saying that your perceptions seem to be a bit off as well.