Customer Reviews

Hacking Windows XP (ExtremeTech)

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Don't let the title of this book fool you - there is nothing evil going on here. The word "hacking" in the title refers to all the tweaks, modifications, optimizations, and customizations covered in the book.

If you are a Windows XP user who already knows the basics, this book is the perfect source for making your Windows XP install your own. Steve Sinchak does a great job of guiding even first time "hackers" into the world of system customization.

Contents at a Glance:

Part I: Customizing Your System

Chapter 1: Customizing the Look of the Startup
Chapter 2: Customizing User Navigation
Chapter 3: Hacking the Desktop
Chapter 4: Customizing the Appearance of the Windows Interface
Chapter 5: Hacking Windows Explorer
Chapter 6: Exploring Other Windows Enhancements

Part II: Increasing Your System's Performance

Chapter 7: Analyzing Your System
Chapter 8: Speeding Up the System Boot
Chapter 9: Making Your Computer Load Faster
Chapter 10: Making Your Computer More Responsive
Chapter 11: Speeding Up Your Computer

Part III: Securing Your System

Chapter 12: Protecting Your Computer from Intruders
Chapter 13: Fighting Spam, Spyware, and Viruses
Chapter 14: Protecting Your Privacy

The first 6 chapters are about fiddling with the user interface and some pretty cool eye candy. You'll find out how to change the system bootscreen, building a custom Welcome/login interface, an easy way to recompile explorer.exe to change START button text (with the book it's not as hard as is sounds,) build virtual desktops, create custom themes, and hack Windows Explorer.

Part II was the most interesting to me, and in my opinion is the best part of the book. If you are looking to squeeze every possible ounce of speed from your XP machine, here you will find answers. First you will get a snapshot of your system's current speed situation using some great benchmarking and analysis tools.

Next,this book guides you through shaving time off the boot process by hacking the boot.ini file, tweaking BIOS settings, turning off services you dont need (complete with great explainations of what each one does, and a couple of suggested configurations for maximum boot speed,)and maximizing boot file location on the hard disk.

Once the boot is complete, the book shows you how to make XP load faster by adjusting startup programs, making registry hacks to filesystem settings, and even network IP settings for faster load times.

And when XP is up and running you'll get a look at how the prefetcher works, registry hacks to tweak its performance, boost Intel CPU performance, tune the paging file, optimize Internet connections for maximum speed, and boost the speed of your home network browsing.

The book wraps up with some great tricks for securing your XP install, dealing with Viruses and Spyware, and protectig your privacy.

This title does include a CD, and I generally write those off as a little gimmicky. But in this case, it adds tremendous value to the book. Not only does it come with 45 hacking tools and toys, most importantly it includes .reg files for registry hacks, and many of them have "undo" files if you want to revert to the old settings. Simply double clicking on these .reg files makes the registry hacks automatic, and keeps you from having to trudge through the Win XP registry.

If you are a Windows XP beginner, this book is not for you. This is a great guide for Windows XP power users - those who know the basics, and are not afraid to dive in and do some under the hood work on their system. Recommended.

I think the main problem with this book is the title. It's not about hacking or hackproofing XP; it's about *customizing* it, and mostly in cosmetic ways. Any discussion about enhancing performance or security generally falls in the category of things you likely already know if you've spent a few years working with Windows. Trimming startup apps, turning off services, tightening network security. Good stuff for the beginner, to be sure. Aside from that, there is a lot of emphasis on changing the look and feel of the interface and using shareware apps.

One element that may quickly begin to wear on non-teenagers is the level of writing. Practically every section begins something like this: "Such and such is a cool new feature in Windows XP and looks really great, but sometimes it gets kind of boring to look at, so I'll show you how to change it." There is also a surprising number of grammatical and spelling mistakes in the book. My advice to the editor: it's hard to take a book seriously with such flabby writing and slangy style. This is a book, not a webpage. When it comes to grossly overused words like cool, neat, and great; I would advise the following formula for how many should be allowed in published material: Take the average age of your target audience, divide by the number of chapters in the book, divide that by the number of topics in each chapter, then multiply by zero.

If you are a teenager who's really into themes, skins, fonts, and other eye candy, this is the book for you. You'll also learn some good basic tips about modifying more important parts of your system. But if you're a person who has supported Windows for years and is looking for serious hacks that can be described in ways other than "cool," make sure you flip through the book before buying.

It is the explanations that make this such a treat. I have read dozens of tweaks in various places but rarely do they explain what is going on. This also makes it easy to undo them (there was one that turned off the old DOS naming of files that the new Roller Coaster Tycoon game did not like). I read through the book and bookmarked the 20 or so that I liked the most. Then I found a dozen more. Now every three pages are tweaks that I am doing to all the computers in the house and my relatives. It also opened my eyes to Windows XP styles. I have timidly tried WindowBlinds and I loved it! Enough gushing, but for me a great book.

I am a fairly advanced WinXP user and bought this book because it was recommended on tweakxp.com -- a website I refer to frequently for tips on how to optimize the look and performance of Windows XP. They noted that the book would not be like the website, but instead be a much more refined, organized, and in-depth guide to squeezing those last few drops of performance out of your system.

They wrong.

Yes, it is well-organized and well-written, but if you are at all interested in tweaking your Windows system to make it look and perform better, every single one of these 200+ "hacks" can be found on the Internet on tweakxp.com or by doing a simple Google search for Windows optimization tips.

I will give the guide credit to publicizing small, lesser-known shareware products that are written to diagnose, analyze, or improve Windows performance. If you are interested in knowing what programs the author feels are top-of-the-line as of the publish date, this book may be worth the price to you.

As it is, however, I recommend doing a few minutes of web searching and saving yourself $15.

If you're the type of computer user who likes to tweak the machine to do things it normally doesn't do, you'll like Hacking Windows XP by Steve Sinchak (Wiley).

Chapter List:
Part 1 - Customizing Your System - Customizing the Look of the Startup; Customizing User Navigation; Hacking the Desktop; Customizing the Appearance of the Windows Interface; Hacking Windows Explorer; Exploring Other Windows Enhancements
Part 2 - Increasing Your System's Performance - Analyzing Your System; Speeding Up the System Boot; Making Your Computer Load Faster; Making Your Computer More Responsive; Speeding Up Your Computer
Part 3 - Securing Your System - Protecting Your Computer from Intruders; Fighting Spam, Spyware, and Viruses; Protecting Your Privacy

Appendix A: What's on the CD-ROM; Index; End-User License Agreement

I had no sooner opened the box that had this book in it, and my son immediately took off with it. Since he's the only one running XP in the house, I figured that was reasonable. In less than an hour, he had a whole new boot screen proclaiming his Windows XP OS to be the Doom 3 version with a video game wallpaper with no icons showing. He was also showing me how to set the priorities of certain tasks that were running with the Task Manager options. It's only taken me about three weeks to finally sneak it off his desk.

Sinchak uses a variety of built-in features and third-party software to give you the ability to change many of the features of your system. If you want to change your boot-up screen, you'll have step-by-step instructions on how to do so. If you want to customize the way your windows act on the desktop, that's here too. While the Part 1 tweaks are more for fun, Part 2 gets more serious and useful. He goes into a number of tweaks and settings that will allow you to wring out every last drop of performance from your system. If you're running the latest and greatest Ghz CPU, you may not need to do these things, but PCs that are two or three years old could benefit from these settings.

Good book, interesting material, and lots of fun to explore. I only wish my work laptop (that runs XP) wasn't so locked down... :-)

The good thing about the book is that the steps are easy to follow & most technique's can be applied to most XP editions. It's also good in the fact that it doesn't get into too much theory, it gets straight to the point & shows the 'how to' & 'why to'

What I didn't appreciate about the book is that most of these 'hacks' seem like a collection of customizations you can easily learn & find at any site on the net. If you are already scoping around the net for hacks & tweaks to your system & decided maybe this book can 'add more tricks in your book' then you might be in for an unpleasant surprise. At the end, you might even say to yourself "I could have written this & that chapter" (Assuming you have an intermediate level of PC knowledge)

More for novice users. Some of the information is already superceeded, some of the hacks have been blocked by security upgrades in XP.

Is there a competitive push between publishers concerning books with hacks? O'Reilly has put out a series of these, each detailing 100 hacks. Now from Wiley, Sinchak talks about Microsoft Windows XP and provides us with over 200 hacks.

A lot of hacks centre around customising various aspects of the UI. Not surprising. Appeals to those who like to fully explore what XP can do for you, going beyond the standard setup seen by the masses. Of necessity, Microsoft has to make the default setup somewhat of a least common denominator. That is the default UI was probably chosen after a lot of usability studies of what the typical user demands might be.

But maybe you have special needs?

Other parts of the book let you soup up system performance and beef up its security. (For the latter, especially defending against viruses and spyware.) I don't gainsay this utility. But a nagging feeling says that most of you will end up concentrating on tweaking the UI. Hours of fun.

I was hoping for a more in-depth guide to XP, but this book is mostly surface changes to the appearance. Cute, but hardly deep hacking. I'll probably be selling this book very soon, if that tells you what a treasure it is.

This is my new favorite book on XP. It shows you how to do many cool things in an easy to read and understand format. One reviewer wrote that all of the info in the book can be found on the web. Maybe if you illegally download the ebook version of this book.

This book is loaded with unique content and is organized into a complete reference unlike any other XP book I have seen. The background information and undo help that the author provides makes the book very fun to read and you learn a lot about how Windows XP actually works.

The book is organized into three main parts. The first part is called customizing your system. It talk about... well.. customizing the look of your computer. It starts off by talking about customizing the boot screen and then the welcome screen. Then, it guides you through customizing the look of the user interface. The author goes into great detail in showing you how to customize things you never even thought about.

The second part of the book is called increasing your system's performance. First, the author covers how to analyze your computer for possible bottlenecks and even benchmark your computer so that you can have a base score to see how much faster you made your computer. Then they go through four chapters of tips to speed up your computer starting with the boot to general speed tips.

The last part of the book is all about security. It talks about protecting your computer from hackers and how to fight spam, spyware, viruses, etc. This chapter was very useful as I had a lot of spyware on my computer and the book helped me get that junk off.

Over all, I am very pleased with the book. It is not just a book of random tips like most XP books. Everything is organized just right with a lot of backgroud information which makes it fun to read. Well Done!