Insider Power Techniques for Microsoft Windows XP (Bpg-Other) [Paperback]

Paul McFedries (Author), Geoff Winslow (Author), Scott Andersen (Author), Austin Wilson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 22, 2003 | Series: Bpg-Other

Accept no limits! Tweak Windows XP for ultimate performance with the undocumented secrets and hidden gems of the experts who work with the technology every day. Three Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) professionals have teamed with well-known Windows book author Paul McFedries to reveal their best from-the-field techniques, practices, hacks, tricks, and workarounds for putting all of your PC’s muscle to work. Smart, straightforward, and uncompromisingly practical, this book is the ultimate insider’s guide to pushing Windows XP as far as it can go!

Put professional-level practices to work for you:

• Tweak registry settings without getting burned
• Employ lethal techniques to help fight viruses, intruders, and spam
• Customize startup and shutdown—get work done behind the scenes
• Install devices and drivers—painlessly
• Learn 10 ways to help give your system rock-solid stability
• Write your own scripts—or run the ones inside
• Share your PC using group policies, account lock-outs, and other management tools
• Optimize memory, performance, and usability
• Easily synchronize files between your mobile and desktop PCs
• Troubleshoot problems the way the experts do

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Paul McFedries is the author of numerous books on Windows, including Complete Idiot's Guide to Windows XP, Unauthorized Guide to Windows Me, Complete Idiot's Guide to Windows Me, Complete Idiot's Guide to Windows 2000, Unauthorized Guide to Windows 98, Complete Idiot's Guide to Windows 98, Windows 98 Unleashed, and Windows 95 Unleashed.

Geoff Winslow has been in the consulting field for more than 10 years, with just over five years with Microsoft, first as a consultant and then as a senior consultant. His experience with Windows has been infrastructure engagements, from Microsoft Windows NT 3.51 OS deployments and domain designs all the way through to current day Windows 2000 and XP deployments and Active Directory® designs and deployments.

Scott Andersen is an MCS consultant and MCP with 12 years of IT and consulting experience. He works with customers designing, building and deploying Windows XP desktop solutions.

Austin Wilson has been with Microsoft since 1994 as a systems engineer, an architectural engineer, a principal consultant, and a service line architect. Most recently he has been involved in corporate Windows XP deployments.

Product Details

• Paperback: 412 pages
• Publisher: Microsoft Press; 1 edition (February 22, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735618968
• ISBN-13: 978-0735618961
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 7.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,247,834 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Like many people in the modern age, Scott Andersen is working on his third career. He began his professional life as a public school teacher, working with K-4th grade students in Bloomington, Indiana, for the Monroe Country Community School System. During his teaching career Scott published a number of articles in professional magazines and journals, on subjects ranging from building model rockets with second graders to the results of a 3 month impact study on acid rain with second graders. During a summer school class Scott and his students developed a series of Hypercard stacks about Dinosaurs. These included images created by the students as well as sounds the students believed represented the sounds dinosaurs would make.
Scott was born in Evanston Illinois in 1960. He lived in Chicago until his 5th birthday when his parents moved to Bloomington Indiana. From 1965 to 1991 Scott lived in Bloomington Indiana. His family did leave Indiana for a stint in Bangkok Thailand in 1972 while his father worked for the UN's children and education agency. Scott attended Bloomington High School South graduating in 1979 and Indiana University graduating in 1984. Upon graduation with his teaching degree Scott began teaching school working in Kindergarten, Pre-First, Second Grade and Fourth grade as a school teacher. During this time he founded the Society of Dead Teachers (or DTS) an international teaching organization that spanned the globe with nearly 14,000 internet members at its peak.
Scott left Bloomington in 1991, moving to Ohio, where he had planned to continue his career in public education. Fate however had other plans at that time. While on the waiting list to join the Cincinnati Public Schools, Scott took work as a trainer for a local Computer training company. Scott began training customers on how to use applications and use of computer programs. Eventually Scott moved into sales, as the inside sales representative for a Louisville Kentucky based company CBM (Crocker Business Machines). Scott's newfound interest in technology led him to join Cincinnati-based "The Future Now", a rapidly expanding computer reseller, with a focus on small, medium and large businesses. Starting as a (Macintosh) helpdesk professional, he was rapidly promoted to Lead Engineer running the technical side of the helpdesk. After hours Scott worked with several other professionals as they struggled to build the first email system for the company. This solution included WAN based locations (Cincinnati, Columbus Ohio and Atlanta Georgia) as well as a number of dialup post offices. Eventually the internal IT team asked Scott to take over the mail system full time. There, Scott worked on improving the efficiency and performance of The Future Now's multi-vendor email system. He developed the Soft-Switch solution that connected the company's CC:mail, MSMail, MS Exchange and Lotus Notes email systems to IBM's AS/400 system.
It was shortly after finishing the Soft-Switch solution that Microsoft released the new messaging program Microsoft Exchange. Scott designed the first centralized mail system for the Future Now, consolidating mail to a single location to ease migrations for both servers and users. During this process he was offered a position by Microsoft Corporation as a messaging specialist. Scott focused on a number of Messaging compete solutions being the Great Lakes District lead for Notes Assessments (later Domino) and Messaging Connectivity.
At Microsoft, he held a number of leadership positions, ranging from the Microsoft's highest level Principal Consultant, and Senior Architect positions, to strategic and global positions of leadership in intellectual property and emerging technologies. During his 13 years with Microsoft, Scott has become globally recognized as a leader in messaging and collaboration architecture and technology, system migration and integration, and developing/delivering business solutions that exceed customer expectations. Many of these solutions have focused on moving off of Lotus Domino to Services Organization stack to Microsoft's collaboration platform.
Scott left Microsoft in 2011 and now works for an Aerospace company. He and his family packed up and moved east, now residing in Gaithersburg Maryland!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Gross Misuse of the phrase "Power Techniques", September 29, 2003

By 

Jase T. Wolfe - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Insider Power Techniques for Microsoft Windows XP (Bpg-Other) (Paperback)

If this book was written about cars, their "Power Techniques" would include how to set your radios pre-sets, reset the trip odometer, and roll down both the driver and passenger power windows by using two fingers to work both switches at once. Knowing how to use your OS as a proficient user is not a utilizing "field-proven secrets of the pros", as the back cover would have you believe.

The first section of this book is devoted to teaching you how to configure, find, and launch control panel applets (mostly using the GUIs - really), followed by an overview of the Tweak UI add-on Microsoft provides as a standard free download. Another section includes an overview of how to open and read items within the registry (using the standard registry editor) which does not go into any specific configurations or tweaks, but rather on an explanation of what you are looking at and a warning about messing with it. Subsequent sections cover such things as controlling which applications start up, managing local users, installing devices, configuring the Explorer, configuring the Windows Media Player and ?getting the most of the Internet Explorer?. None of these sections include anything which is not done through the Microsoft provided interfaces and which wouldn?t be covered in an "Introduction to XP" style book.

The book also includes an entire section "devoted" to scripting Windows (30 pages). Like so many other books that cover scripting, the section is not going to leave the reader with the ability to script anything and is more likely to confuse and ?turn off? any desire to learn more.

Essentially, there are many excellent titles which serve to introduce a new user to Windows XP (such as ISBN 0782140769), as well as titles which will actually teach "power techniques" to a user (ISBN 0782141145 and ISBN 078214067X). This title is misleading to users already familiar and comfortable with Windows XP and better titles will prove more useful to any user who really wants to master the OS.