Customer Reviews

Windows Vista Inside Out, Deluxe Edition

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Definitely the best comprehensive guide book on the planet.

This book guides step by step from Setup & Start up to Advanced System Management. You really cannot go wrong with this book.

The diagrams & figures are perfectly designed and explained.

To added all it includes a CD which you find downloadable gadgets and tools for the customizing your desktop. Links to troubleshooting tools, security updates, and product demos. Fully searchable e-Book and other e-Books.

These guys were my first and best resource for Windows XP and they haven't failed me with Vista.

I have 15 pounds of Vista documentation on my book shelf, and one e-book on my hard drive. Guess which one?

No one source can hold all information about Vista. I search the electronic version of this book first for my Vista questions and if the perfect solution is not there, I have still learned enough to get to quickly get to the heart of the topic without doing countless fruitless web searches.
Windows Vista Inside Out, Deluxe Edition

First, for most of you, this is a great book. Ed Bott is among the best writers about Windows out there, and the book has great indices and layout. It answers 95-99% of my questions well.

I haven't really read a lot of it, but referred to it here and there. I've generally found the answer to what I need (and I do some work in software testing). I haven't been able to find a good resolution to a problem plaguing my home system about waking up USB devices in sleep mode. (Apparently this is a known issue and well documented on the MS site). This book is good at explaining how things are supposed to work, not as good at explaining why they don't always function the way they're supposed to.

One other hilarious thing. The appendix contains about 30-40 pages that list bugs which were fixed. Talk about padding!

Of the Vista How-To books for general users I've read thus far, if I needed to give a "Your OS And You" publication to a new user, this would be it. Although Vista is now at SP2 and this title only covers the enhancements of SP1, SP2 isn't bringing anything new to the table that would devalue this book.

The presentation of information is primarily walk-thrus, with around one screenshot per page so you can see what they are talking about. With little exception, the information given is all based on Vista's intrinsic components, utilities, and wizards, heavily focused on pointing you to the right menu or applet for the task you're doing. Beyond the obligatory Vista Installation chapters, this task coverage ranges from very easy (changing Windows Media Player's visualizations, setting up email with Windows Live Mail, sharing your photos, etc.) to home-administration (working with the command shell utilities, setting up a home network, monitoring your system, etc.). All of it clearly written, enjoyable, and (as the book itself says) "supremely organized". My only true gripe is that they opted to include information on batch, Windows Script Host, and Powershell scripting - in 4 pages that are not going to help anyone at all and actually make it look confusing enough to put many people off from learning.

The included CD has little more than the book in PDF form along with sample chapters of other books, although it has some information which seems to be geared to corporate administrators looking to deploy Vista.

I am a computer professional and assumed I would understand Vista based on my experience with Win XP and experience with many Microsoft products. I was wrong. Simple things no longer seemed simple, and intuitive was not the word that came to mind when using it.

However, there is a method to Vista's madness -- you just need someone to explain it. For example, to search for a file in Win XP you can right-click on a folder and select Search. In Vista, there are many ways to search, most of them are not as self-defined as in XP. Vista Help, as with many Microsoft products, is not sufficient, at least for me.

You will use this as a reference -- no one would actually want to read through the book chapter by chapter. The writing is clear and diagrams helpful. All in all, another good book in the Inside Out series.

This is a very big book full of lots of important and valuable info. This book can be used extremely efficiently as a reference guide. It has lots of thorough and clear info on more things about Vista than I'll probably ever need. Great book.

This publication does an excellent job of explaining the myriad features of Vista in a clear, concise manner. Particularly noteworthy are the many tips that are highlighted throughout the text - they are extremely useful, and may not be available elsewhere.

While the basic facts are probably available on the Microsoft website, it would take me a lifetime to find them. Thanks Microsoft Press.

It is a very thorough book. One of the nicest features of these books is that they come with a CD that has the entire ebook on disk along with many other features. I hardly ever refer to the book because I have the ebook and a dictionary on all my computers. I upgraded to Windows 7 recently and purchased that book also. The windows 7 version also came with the CD and ebook and some other publications. I also purchased Office 2010 and was going to buy the companion book for that one. But I looked at the reviews for that book, there were only two and they booth gave it a very low. The main reason given was that they no longer give you the CD and ebook but refere you to some on line service. So you no longer have the stand alone ebook. I decided I wouldn't bother with there books any longer. I went instead for SimonSezIt DVD course in Office 2010 and Windows 7 which I like very much. In other word the old books are great and the new ones aren't because they are trying to make you dependant on other services.

Fantastic and easy to understand. This book has come to my rescue more times than I can tell u. I wld advise anyone with Vista wanting to get their operating system to run better, to buy this book.

The book is large and unless you are a professional this books is a great reference for almost any question you might have. I found it too large to be a book you want to read, but skimming through the pages gives you a good idea of what you might have in there when the need arises. Sometimes you may need a background to understand their omissions from a step by step guide on a particular topic.