Customer Reviews

Windows XP Annoyances for Geeks, 2nd Edition

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Isn't that a neat picture on the cover? Certainly grabs one's attention.

Possibly the most complaints about Microsoft Windows XP come not from Mac or linux users, but from some long suffering Microsoft users themselves. Karp hopes to alleviate some of these complaints in this updated book.

Perhaps the greatest irony of the book is the space devoted to dealing with Service Pack 2 issues. Remember that SP2 is meant to fix many bugs. And indeed it does. But in the process, it changed various system settings so that, for example, some of your network applications might now seemingly break. Karp explains that it was because SP2 was doing its job and tightened up the Microsoft Windows Firewall. So he shows how to tweak the latter to re-enable your applications.

Overall, the book is very detailed. But this can be a great help if you apply one of his fixes. Since the steps he gives are explicit enough to easily follow. Realistically, this second edition is unlikely to be the last. The next version of XP is bound to generate annoyances of its own.

Windows XP is a fact of life for most of us. The sad fact of the matter is that Windows is bloated and sick - loaded with performance/security/stability robbing settings and "extras". Karp's excellent volume - simple enough for the layman but deeply valuable even for the experienced lays out how to pare down XP to fighting form. You can't change XP's basic nature - but you can improve matters significantly. Windows XP Annoyances for Geeks is well organized (like all O'Reilly books) and full of practical, real-world tips. If you must support or roll out XP in a corporate environment, then this book becomes essential to your survival (or at least your sanity). Is it the last word? Probably not - but you will not actually read or use much more than you get here. Highly recommended.

This is a good, solid book on Windows XP, but it is disappointing in that it is not as deep as I would have hoped. O' Reilly seems to have wanted to distinguish this annoyances book from their excellent XP Hacks book.

Perhaps it is the "for Geeks" in the title that increased my expectations. But it seems the author strained a bit to fill pages - sixty of them, for example, on VB Scripting and the Command Line. The short section on "Choosing the Right Filesystem", discussing whether to use FAT, FAT32 or NTFS seems superfluous in a book aimed at "Geeks". As the book itself says "[i]f Windows XP is the only operating system . . . you should be using NTDS - no question." Even though the book dates from 2004, any "Geek" would have known that. In fact, author Karp is actually wrong: there are certain applications that require you to use FAT32, but those would be used only by real geeks.

Overall, it's worth the money as so many O'Reilly books are, and a solid addiiton to any geek's library.

Jerry

Lots of good stuff here for getting the most out of your system. Highly recommended for tech types. (I have been using, building and programming computers since 1983.)

This book knocks off many of the rough edges of Microsoft's XP operating system by revealing the complications of their programming and their convoluted logic. For the discerning user struggling to be master of the machine rather than the captive user of a second rate product

The O'Reilly Annoyances books for windows are a real Godsend. They have always opened up some of the inner workings of windows so that one is able to tailor the system to a much better performer than what comes with the standard setup. Anyone who wishes to make the OS more to their liking needs to have this book as the wealth of information in one source can't be beat. There are a lot of tweaks that you can make that Microsoft doesn't provide easily found information for. This book is a must have to have that information right at hand.

I came across this book looking in the college library for a book to help me solve many problems I had with my PC that accumulated over the years. I decided to own the book as an inexpensive consultant to make my PC work to its utmost performance. I was so excited to find it at Amazon that I inadvertently purchased two copies. The strange thing, one purchase was quite a bit less expensive than the other which I returned to Amazon without any problems for a refund. Amazon even paid for the return postage.That's good business.

good stuff. could have been more advanced. questionable organization (much like windows itself.) still, the tips and tricks picked up more than paid for the volume.