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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.
Tell that to my MMORPG-freak friends who would die without Everquest or that starwars stuff.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Replying to my own post again.. I forgot to point out that the reviewer is even afraid to upgrade to the latest version of Windows and feels safe and secure with Windows 98! I had not considered that this kind of person reads /. How many feeble, trembling, gutless Windows 98 users are there still out there?
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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.
be prepared for benefits like:
.ini files to something downright usable.
- being able to enjoy those cute "I love you" and "Anna Kurovina" messages automatically forwarded from your best friends, co-workers, and total strangers.
- The ability to browse every site online, at least every one selling X10 cameras and pictures you wouldn't want your boss to see.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Linux is no longer hard. Once you have a modern Debian, Red Hat, or Mandrake installed, everything runs easy-peasy. I've been using it on and off for 6 years, and in that time frame it's gone from nothing but command line editing of
We have a woman in the office who had never used a computer before in her life. We plunked her down in front of a Windows box and a Linux box. While Covad required Internet Explorer, she was always using Linux. She likes the multiple desktops (Microsoft has a power tool multidesktop, BTW), changes her wallpaper every few days, and prefers browsing around in Konqueror. To her, editing the registry is as baffling as editing a shell script, but she doesn't need to do that anyway. If she wants something installed on Debian, it is an apt-get away (whereas in windows she has to look for it). I'd feel comfortable putting newbies in front of a Linux install. In fact, I've done it, many times, and with success.
I respect the opinions of my Linux elders, but I fear your perceptions of the OS may be a little out of date.
The ______ Agenda
The damn thing still comes up under certain conditions even if you check that box. He probably tells you how to nuke it completely.
"- not being able to open that complex word attachment that your coworker mailed you"
if everyone at the company is using Linux, not likly to happen. owever, I have not seen I word document that I couldn't open under Linux in over a year.
"- not being able to browse every site online (some are definitely IE specific, others require plugins not available on linux)"
is that really an issue? The few sites that are IE only, have alternatives.
The only site I had an issue with was my bank. I sent them an email explaing to them my problem, and that a large portion of there customers have dial-up, and thus, they should be complient for those users. They made it more towards standards, and now I can use it, easy peasy.
"- figure out how users, accounts, software installations etc. work (click on a link and the program installs automatically? yeah, right), not to mention the joys of the command line
"
That would be a boon in the corporate enviromaent, make it difficult for user to install that 'harmless' app.
However, this is changing,m and a lot of installs are becoming point and click.
all the major issue you note are becoming a moot point. And if enough people start using Linux, MS will release a Linux version of office. It makes to much money not to.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
I've been running XP for almost 6 months and it has *never* crashed.
Switch you fool! (Oh, and inquire your fellow nerds for a, um, *cough*, discount)
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I'm surprised that this book got an "8" for offering such profoundly useful advice such as how to eliminate popups or to use less ink in your printer by using economy mode. Did any of the advice mentioned in the review even remotely pique your interest (assuming you have to deal with Windows at all)? When auto-correct annoyed me (which it also did in OpenOffice), I looked through the options and turned it off. If that's too hard to figure out without a book, then you need some basic software education instead of a grab-bag of "tricks".
I wonder what versions of Windows the book refers to? I thought PowerDesk only worked for Windows 95-ME. And what software is it really addressing? If it's giving any advice about Internet Explorer, I hope that it's to remove all file associations and hide all links to it by deleting them or burying them deeply in Start Menu/Programs/Accessories/Unsupported Software/Mistakes/Don't Go Here/Did You Try Mozilla?/FireBird?/Opera?/You Can't Be Serious!/Are You Really Really Sure?/Okay But Don't Blame OReilly/.
My dad, who's in his late 70s, bought a PC last year (because it was cheap & he is parsimonious). This replaced an antique Mac Classic, which still runs BTW. After many phone calls for advice about Win XP, I showed him the Annoyances web site. He looked at me & looked relieved. "So other people are just as annoyed with this stuff as I am, huh?" And he's had fun implementing the various fixes, although he's still too stingy to go buy the book. Maybe I'll get him the book for Christmas... I've already left him a Knoppix CD to play with, though ;-)
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
So MS-Word == The WORLD now, eh?
This neither begins nor ends with "the free software camp". Making information more difficult to extract is a Bad Idea, 'k? What if i want to search in it / translate it / distribute it / insert it in a Web CMS?
Ol' Mrs. computersareevil i presume?
How 'bout you go work in a Windows shop for a few years, and then come back with some decent arguments.
Windows works. For the most part, I can do what I want to do in Windows.
GLX mostly works. I just downloaded and installed kde-3.1.94 on my slackware box at home. One cool thing new to this version of kde: You can adjust your screen resolution in REAL TIME--no restarting of X required! (I know, this really a new "X" feature, and you could do it with the keyboard from kde...But I digress).
Wow--that was cool! Just like...that other OS. Except you can't change the color depth without editing XF86Config.
But I still use GLX. Why? Because it's FUN. I like farting around with my OS. I like installing new stuff, learning about how it works, and getting it running. I like dealing with the community of users and developers and learning new stuff from folks. And, ever so infrequently, teaching somebody how to do something I learned last week.
It feels more like it's "my" computer.
The GNU OS, on top of Linux and under X functions. I can do what I want with it. But that's not why I use it.
I use it because it's fun.
I can stumble around in Windows. I can hack the registry and get what I want. I have book marked ntfaq.com. I have set up exotic hardware in Windows. I have used weird proprietary software in Windows.
But in the end, Windows is not fun. Windows is frustrating. It's sneaky. It's secretive. Windows tells me what I can and can't do. It's truly easier to use. But it's not fun.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
What... right like Linux? Which version of the kernel? Or did you mean a specific distro? Which one?
Or are you talking about having the computer configured the correctly out of the box? Configured to whose preferences? Which hardware?
Remember the "P" in PC stands for "Personal". The whole idea is that you can whack it into submission, unlike servers run by us uptight, high-strung operators.
Go configure.
--- "1.21 Jigawatts!" -Doc
The original book was a compilation - kind of a blog. People submitted content to the site.
One scary piece was that, every now and then, Windows would delete a folder containing an MS competitor's product. Not a problem - since essentially all Windows users back up their systems on a regular basis...
Note that Windows XP is too large and slow to run on many machines that run Windoze 98. And, '98 is still a virus/worm nightmare. For these smaller and slower machines, the options are - get a firewall, antivirus, etc., or, load it with Linux.
I still prefer Win 2000 pro over XP, in a lesser of evils sort of way.
-- Stephen.
User: "My computer is rebooting every 10 minutes. I think that the power supply (or hard drive, or power cable, etc.) must be bad."
Am I the only one who has noticed this happenning? I hate to be a conspiracy theorist, but I'm fairly convinced that MS changed the BSOD default action on purpose to divert the attention (of users who don't know any better) from OS errors, so that they don't form the opinion that Windows 2000 is still not *that* great.
O'Reilly has a book about Linux annoyances as well. However, they named it Linux Server Hacks