Slashdot Mirror
It's Never Done That Before
Graeme Williams writes "I really need something that will help me diagnose and fix problems with Windows PCs. I provide occasional support for more than a dozen PCs at my local church, as well as the systems at home, and those that arrive in the wake of my children. I don't do it regularly enough to have a clear model of how I should go about it. I really wanted It's Never Done That Before to provide that clear model, but unfortunately I was disappointed." Read the rest of Graeme's review.
It's Never Done That Before / A Guide to Troubleshooting Windows XP
author
John Ross
pages
xix + 263
publisher
No Starch Press
rating
3
reviewer
Graeme Williams
ISBN
1-59327-139-5
summary
Not organized well enough to help in a real crisis
After reading It's Never Done That Before, I've got a pretty good idea of what I'm looking for in a book about PC repairs. The first part of my ideal book would provide background information about how a PC works. For example, if you wanted to diagnose a problem that occurred during booting, it would help to know what was involved in the boot process, from the power and power supply to the BIOS and MBR and ultimately to Windows, the registry and the desktop.
The second part of my ideal book would explain basic techniques, such as how to change your BIOS settings. These techniques would form a library which could be referred to later in the book without further explanation. The third part of the book would explain things you could do before disaster strikes, such as backing up your data, and writing down your network configuration parameters, and most importantly, making sure you can actually follow the recovery procedures you'll need when disaster does strike. If you can't change BIOS settings when your machine is stable, you're certainly not going to be able to do it when you're terrified that a hard drive failure has lost Auntie Edna and Uncle Norman's pictures. My recommendation would be to permanently set your BIOS boot settings so that your system looks for a boot CD before booting from disk, but if the extra delay bothers you, you can always change it back. At least you'll know what to do.
Evaluating It's Never Done That Before against my ideal, the real book does better on content than it does on organization. For example, it has a useful chapter on what you can do before disaster strikes, and it has a pretty clear explanation of how to change BIOS settings, but they're not in the same place.
The fourth and final part of my ideal book would explain how to diagnose and repair problems. One of the reasons this isn't trivial is that a book should necessarily focus on the most common problems, but has to leave open the possibility that something unlikely is happening. One of the problems I have with my laptop at work is that when I eat lunch at my desk, the touchpad will interpret dropped crumbs as a continual touch, which immediately makes the cursor uncontrollable. Touchpads are not mentioned in It's Never Done That Before – but that's not necessarily an issue. Many more people will, say, have a hard drive failure than will have crumbs on the touchpad, and the book has plenty of material on hard drive failures. But too much of the book assumes you know what the problem is, instead of systematically going through possibilities – and leaving open the possibility that something odd or unlikely is happening.
One of my systems at home is an old hand-me-down desktop from my son. He had installed a firewire card, which remains, and a sound card, which he removed. I put in a new disk, which I partitioned as a dual-boot Linux and Windows XP system, and attached a external firewire drive. The first problem I noticed was that when Linux boots, it changes the BIOS to disable on-board sound. Perhaps this is some kind of "phantom limb syndrome" for the missing sound card? Some time ago, the firewire card became less reliable – at least, if the drive is on, Windows will black screen during boot. This can be avoided by leaving the drive off until Windows has settled down after booting. Lately, when Windows boots it has started to reset the network file sharing settings for the external drive. I fear that the Windows system on this machine is disintegrating, perhaps in anticipation of Vista.
It's not that It's Never Done That Before doesn't cover any of these areas. For example, it has a considerable amount of material on boot problems, including black screens. The problem is that it's not organized as a fault tree, where you start with no knowledge other than the immediate symptoms and proceed to collect data and rule out possibilities until you're left with the precise cause. One of the benefits of doing this carefully is that you won't prematurely decide whether the cause is hardware or software. Unfortunately, It's Never Done That Before just isn't organized this way.
The lack of organization also manifests itself as unnecessary and sometimes irritating repetition. For example, you get to the Windows Advanced Options menu by pressing F8 during startup. On page 46, the instructions are "When the results of the POST [power on self test] appear on the screen, press the F8 key until the Windows Advanced Options menu appears". On page 48, the instructions are to "immediately press F8 a few times" POST is not mentioned. On page 60, the instructions are to "press the F8 key several times".
The book just isn't clear about how a PC connects to the Internet and how that can fail. One indication is that the material is split between Chapter 13, "Internet Connection Problems" and Chapter 15, "Dealing with Hardware Problems", when there's no way you can know a priori whether a problem is hardware or software. Or for that matter whether the problem is yours or your ISP's.
Figure 13-3 on page 147 is the first of two diagrams related to Internet connectivity. The diagram shows something called a Wide Area Network which you connect to that is separate from the Internet Cloud. I suppose this might refer to the BGP AS you're connected to, but that hardly matters to most people. And having introduced the idea that you're connected to some equipment at your ISP, the diagram doesn't make clear that if you're directly connected to the Internet (without a router), your PC gets an IP address from the ISP's DHCP server, but if you're connected via a router, the PC gets its address from the router, and the router gets its address from the ISP. How do you recognize when your PC hasn't got an IP address from the appropriate DHCP server? This is needlessly hard in Windows XP, because the OS "helpfully" defaults to something plausible and wrong, but the book offers no help in digging you out of this one.
Figure 15-1 on page 169 includes a DSLAM (a piece of equipment at the local telephone company), which is a fascinating detail, but not really something you need to know even if you have a DSL connection. At least in the US, the key thing to know is that DSL wiring problems belong to one part of the telephone company (because it's the same wiring as your telephone) but Internet problems belong to a different part. If you live in the inner city, you're quite likely to have wiring problems (based on my experience with a sample of two and a failure rate approaching one per year), but if you have a problem with your line and you're talking to the wrong group within the telephone company you'll be rebooting your PC and checking network settings until you're blue in the face.
The popularity of wireless LANs has introduced a whole new set of problems. At home, my POSSLQ uses a laptop with a wireless PCMCIA card. As the the wireless router got older, the wireless connection on the laptop seemed to get less and less reliable. After avoiding the problem for a while, I stumbled across the length argument on the ping command, and discovered that the packet loss rate depended on the packet length. I adjusted the MTU and things immediately got a lot better. It's Never Done That Before ignores ping in favor of traceroute (which I find confusing for basic connectivity problems) and so would never solve this problem.
Even a simple LAN requires several systems to be up and communicating in order to connect to the Internet. A short time ago I upgraded the wireless router in my home from 802.11b to 802.11g. By systematically going though all the incorrect combinations first, I was able to verify that the procedure given in the router manual was both necessary and sufficient: power off the cable modem, router and PC, and power up the cable modem, router and PC in that order. I also support a local church with a local area network of about a dozen computers, which seems to have an endemic problem with IP address conflicts. In this case, I leave the PCs on and power cycle the router. These rules and especially the reasoning behind them aren't included in It's Never Done That Before.
I'm a little mystified why the author doesn't recommend making a live CD of your favorite Linux distro. If you have a problem that prevents Windows from booting, it's an easy way to connect to the Internet to look for resources. It's also an easy way to confirm more serious problems. I recently had a computer with a motherboard problem go into a reboot loop with a live CD, which was sort of terrifying, but immediately ruled out Windows as the source of the problem
I guess it's clear by now that I don't like It's Never Done That Before. There's a lot of information in the book which many people may find very useful in understanding more about how their PC works and how it fails. The book may very well help people with simple problems. However, the experience I've had fixing PC problems suggests to me that the book is not structured well enough to lead you through the process of diagnosing and repairing an unknown failure."
You can purchase It's Never Done That Before from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
After reading It's Never Done That Before, I've got a pretty good idea of what I'm looking for in a book about PC repairs. The first part of my ideal book would provide background information about how a PC works. For example, if you wanted to diagnose a problem that occurred during booting, it would help to know what was involved in the boot process, from the power and power supply to the BIOS and MBR and ultimately to Windows, the registry and the desktop.
The second part of my ideal book would explain basic techniques, such as how to change your BIOS settings. These techniques would form a library which could be referred to later in the book without further explanation. The third part of the book would explain things you could do before disaster strikes, such as backing up your data, and writing down your network configuration parameters, and most importantly, making sure you can actually follow the recovery procedures you'll need when disaster does strike. If you can't change BIOS settings when your machine is stable, you're certainly not going to be able to do it when you're terrified that a hard drive failure has lost Auntie Edna and Uncle Norman's pictures. My recommendation would be to permanently set your BIOS boot settings so that your system looks for a boot CD before booting from disk, but if the extra delay bothers you, you can always change it back. At least you'll know what to do.
Evaluating It's Never Done That Before against my ideal, the real book does better on content than it does on organization. For example, it has a useful chapter on what you can do before disaster strikes, and it has a pretty clear explanation of how to change BIOS settings, but they're not in the same place.
The fourth and final part of my ideal book would explain how to diagnose and repair problems. One of the reasons this isn't trivial is that a book should necessarily focus on the most common problems, but has to leave open the possibility that something unlikely is happening. One of the problems I have with my laptop at work is that when I eat lunch at my desk, the touchpad will interpret dropped crumbs as a continual touch, which immediately makes the cursor uncontrollable. Touchpads are not mentioned in It's Never Done That Before – but that's not necessarily an issue. Many more people will, say, have a hard drive failure than will have crumbs on the touchpad, and the book has plenty of material on hard drive failures. But too much of the book assumes you know what the problem is, instead of systematically going through possibilities – and leaving open the possibility that something odd or unlikely is happening.
One of my systems at home is an old hand-me-down desktop from my son. He had installed a firewire card, which remains, and a sound card, which he removed. I put in a new disk, which I partitioned as a dual-boot Linux and Windows XP system, and attached a external firewire drive. The first problem I noticed was that when Linux boots, it changes the BIOS to disable on-board sound. Perhaps this is some kind of "phantom limb syndrome" for the missing sound card? Some time ago, the firewire card became less reliable – at least, if the drive is on, Windows will black screen during boot. This can be avoided by leaving the drive off until Windows has settled down after booting. Lately, when Windows boots it has started to reset the network file sharing settings for the external drive. I fear that the Windows system on this machine is disintegrating, perhaps in anticipation of Vista.
It's not that It's Never Done That Before doesn't cover any of these areas. For example, it has a considerable amount of material on boot problems, including black screens. The problem is that it's not organized as a fault tree, where you start with no knowledge other than the immediate symptoms and proceed to collect data and rule out possibilities until you're left with the precise cause. One of the benefits of doing this carefully is that you won't prematurely decide whether the cause is hardware or software. Unfortunately, It's Never Done That Before just isn't organized this way.
The lack of organization also manifests itself as unnecessary and sometimes irritating repetition. For example, you get to the Windows Advanced Options menu by pressing F8 during startup. On page 46, the instructions are "When the results of the POST [power on self test] appear on the screen, press the F8 key until the Windows Advanced Options menu appears". On page 48, the instructions are to "immediately press F8 a few times" POST is not mentioned. On page 60, the instructions are to "press the F8 key several times".
The book just isn't clear about how a PC connects to the Internet and how that can fail. One indication is that the material is split between Chapter 13, "Internet Connection Problems" and Chapter 15, "Dealing with Hardware Problems", when there's no way you can know a priori whether a problem is hardware or software. Or for that matter whether the problem is yours or your ISP's.
Figure 13-3 on page 147 is the first of two diagrams related to Internet connectivity. The diagram shows something called a Wide Area Network which you connect to that is separate from the Internet Cloud. I suppose this might refer to the BGP AS you're connected to, but that hardly matters to most people. And having introduced the idea that you're connected to some equipment at your ISP, the diagram doesn't make clear that if you're directly connected to the Internet (without a router), your PC gets an IP address from the ISP's DHCP server, but if you're connected via a router, the PC gets its address from the router, and the router gets its address from the ISP. How do you recognize when your PC hasn't got an IP address from the appropriate DHCP server? This is needlessly hard in Windows XP, because the OS "helpfully" defaults to something plausible and wrong, but the book offers no help in digging you out of this one.
Figure 15-1 on page 169 includes a DSLAM (a piece of equipment at the local telephone company), which is a fascinating detail, but not really something you need to know even if you have a DSL connection. At least in the US, the key thing to know is that DSL wiring problems belong to one part of the telephone company (because it's the same wiring as your telephone) but Internet problems belong to a different part. If you live in the inner city, you're quite likely to have wiring problems (based on my experience with a sample of two and a failure rate approaching one per year), but if you have a problem with your line and you're talking to the wrong group within the telephone company you'll be rebooting your PC and checking network settings until you're blue in the face.
The popularity of wireless LANs has introduced a whole new set of problems. At home, my POSSLQ uses a laptop with a wireless PCMCIA card. As the the wireless router got older, the wireless connection on the laptop seemed to get less and less reliable. After avoiding the problem for a while, I stumbled across the length argument on the ping command, and discovered that the packet loss rate depended on the packet length. I adjusted the MTU and things immediately got a lot better. It's Never Done That Before ignores ping in favor of traceroute (which I find confusing for basic connectivity problems) and so would never solve this problem.
Even a simple LAN requires several systems to be up and communicating in order to connect to the Internet. A short time ago I upgraded the wireless router in my home from 802.11b to 802.11g. By systematically going though all the incorrect combinations first, I was able to verify that the procedure given in the router manual was both necessary and sufficient: power off the cable modem, router and PC, and power up the cable modem, router and PC in that order. I also support a local church with a local area network of about a dozen computers, which seems to have an endemic problem with IP address conflicts. In this case, I leave the PCs on and power cycle the router. These rules and especially the reasoning behind them aren't included in It's Never Done That Before.
I'm a little mystified why the author doesn't recommend making a live CD of your favorite Linux distro. If you have a problem that prevents Windows from booting, it's an easy way to connect to the Internet to look for resources. It's also an easy way to confirm more serious problems. I recently had a computer with a motherboard problem go into a reboot loop with a live CD, which was sort of terrifying, but immediately ruled out Windows as the source of the problem
I guess it's clear by now that I don't like It's Never Done That Before. There's a lot of information in the book which many people may find very useful in understanding more about how their PC works and how it fails. The book may very well help people with simple problems. However, the experience I've had fixing PC problems suggests to me that the book is not structured well enough to lead you through the process of diagnosing and repairing an unknown failure."
You can purchase It's Never Done That Before from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
it'll do it again when the review is reposted in 3-4 days.
I was once looking for something similar and instead came across the book (Format C, Install Linux) which saved my life!
/sarcasm
If i wanted to hear bullshit, i'd go to church.
Buy my book, but do not open it right away. Put it on a shelf somewhere, or even in a cardboard box. Go use,break,fix, work on computers for about 3 to 5 years, then come get the book, if you can find it.
You will find the book to be completely worthless, same as if you had read it the first day you got it. But it will not matter, because more than likely the experience you got from owning it, and the years of working with computers will have given you the best "experience" possible.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
[url=http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/]BartPE[/url] is the Windows equivalent, pretty nifty. Although something like Knoppix is infinitely more useful, BartPE is still neat.
Someone who basically knows what they are doing doesn't like a book targeted at the clueless masses. Well color me surprised.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I need a It's Never Done That Before: Bodily Functions. I can't go into detail.
"I provide occasional support for more than a dozen PCs at my local church"
;-)
Can't you just leave them switched on overnight and let God take care of things?
I'm SO going to get flamed for this...
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
Whenever you work on computers, it does not hurt to take notes of interesting problems/solutions. This is even more true if you are working on Linux boxes and still a relative newbie. While relearning is sometimes necessary, the time to do it is not when you have a dead/dying machine to get back up.
Document what you do, and later with a little more experience under your belt, go back and see if you can improve upon what you did before.
And for those of you who are utter genious and have excellent memory, just wait. Funny how as you get older, it either gets harder to remember everything. Might be because there is more to remember, or your priorities change and how to fix random computer problem is no longer the highlight of your life.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
It's the same with fixing Windows PCs also and it's not something a book can tell you.
My advice to anyone with a Windows PC is to get it right from the word go. I still cannot believe PC vendors will sell a PC with a 300GB drive in it with just ONE (C:) partition - educate users to use D: and E: drives for their personal programs and files, then when Windows needs to be reinstalled, the process is less painful.
Also keep a recent Ghost image to hand - then if a problem persists more than half-an-hour, just reinstall the whole thing within an additional half hour.
And in the interim, install a virtually automated virus checker like AVG Free, put Spybot and Ad-Aware on, and make Firefox the default browser.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Despite many objections, said textbooks are not worthless. I have a few myself, that I keep around for various things. A desk that is not quite level, needing to site in a scope on a rifle, mounting motherboard you do not have the right case for... all good uses of these books.
Though I have to admit, as I get older, sometimes I find math a bit more intersting than when I was required to take the courses. If I had to take them again, doubt I would do it voluntarily, I might well learn more the second ( okay more like 5th ) time around.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Patient: Hey dod, my arm hurts when I do this (swings arm back and forth).
Doctor: Then don't do that!
Seriously, if the problem is that your touchpad doesn't like having crumbs on it, don't eat over your touchpad/keyboard. Problem solved!
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
It sounds like something you might hear in the same conversation as "It happens to a lot of men, honey!"
...I think it was Computerworld, possibly Datamation... circa the early eighties.
The caption was: "So, how are your company's PC users doing?"
The picture shows a guy in a suit behind a desk. In front of him is some kind of PC which has more or less exploded; there is smoke coming from it, the top of the case has a jagged hole in it, there are fragments of something or other all over his desk.
He is showing not a sign of emotion: just a dispassionate poker face. There is a thought balloon over his head, and he is thinking "It's never done that before." No exclamation point, no italics.
IMHO it is very likely that the jacket illustration was, uh, "inspired" by that old Computerworld cartoon... which in my opinion, was funnier.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
A book that would fit this guy's criteria would have to come in volumes, and be encyclopedia sized, and have updates every month to keep up to date. Its unrealistic.
For example, he talks about BIOS settings, and "not in the same place." I don't know if he means the BIOS settings aren't in the same place as his BIOS, or they are in a different section of teh book than he'd like. BIOSes are all different, settings are probably in different places. You can't expect to have a rundown of every single BIOS layout and settings. They also update settings over time, and you have atleast 3 or more ways to GET into the BIOS.
And when you talk about problems, do you know how many problems you could have with a PC? From having a USB disk attatched, to IRQ conflicts, to faulty hardware, to missing dll files, to just plain corrupt files, there are hundreds if not thousands of possibilities. And the solutions are not always very simple or easy. For basic and common problems, a book might give general tips and tricks. But I doubt a book could cover every contingency.
He even says the book relies on traceroute instead of ping for oen of the problems, and as such would never resolve the issue.
You know, if you are so smart as to ridicule a book, why not write your own? Its easy to complain about something that's missing or incorrect.
Ok, lets use the infamous car analogy.
.... and speak in such a way ... and have everything that could be needed ... etc. In other words a recipe book for whatever can possiby go wrong and often does. I understand the concept. I just don't think it's attainable.
... but broken rods punched through the oil pan? Burn't valves? Fuel injector misfires? ... and so on and so forth .... I mean most people ricochet of the curbs at high rates of speed and thnk that's normal.
A person has a car and don't know how to drive and don't want to pay a mechanic to fix the breakage. They want a book that covers all features and all possibilities of anything that could possibly go wrong for all makes and models of automobiles AND it has to be clear, concise and perfectly attuned for any skill level from noob to nuts.
It has to be laid out in such a way
I agree that users should be able to change a tire... what changing a tire equates to in personal computer land is certainly up for debate
Lets face it. These books are for the rubes to spend money on and then pay a tech twice for fixing the original problem plus those they created themselves after reading the book.
I'm a tech with more years then I'd care to admit and have a large library that one time was indispensible. I do buy books on occassion but nothing like in years past. Today almost everything is on the 'net'. That's the primary resource now and I can't envision one lone book that would meet the needs of the target audience. If there was such a beast it would run ten thousand pages at least and nobody in the target audience would lift it. Would also be out of date the date it was printed.
Another thing needs acknowledged is that people who naturaly gravitate to computer level complexity are a distinct breed. Few actually, have the capacity or the natural inclination for it. The others can learn to drive, check the fluids and perhaps perform the most rudimentary of maintenance tasks but that is all. Maybe install software.
So the book is targeted at the would be mechanic?
Well ok then. It's a start... down a very long road.
It is probably not the most popular subject on Slashdot, but the A+ training materials provide a decent fundamental knowledge of hardware, software, Operating Systems, and how everything works togather. It is where I started, and i now not only know how to work on computers but i get paid for it.
Crisis is the rule, not the exception.
What's up with people having a Tech IQ of 0 posting on slashdot. If you're trying to read a book to figure out how to fix a Windows machine instead of going straight to google, you're better off going to Frys or calling GeekSquad.
You do not learn how to fix computers by reading books.