Customer Reviews

Windows XP Power Hound: Teach Yourself New Tricks

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

 

 

Every book has its target readers. Power Hound's target audience is beginner with little to no knowledge or experience with previous windows version. It also contains a lot of marketing material which may or may not relate directly to XP. For example, it recommends www.efax.com which is a web based fax service and is not tied to just XP.
That said, this book does provide some information that both experts and beginners will find useful
Positives:
1) A single source for all your windows XP tips and tricks
2) Contains examples and screen shots making it very easy to understand the topic.
3) It introduced Firefox, the best browser out there. I have now switched completely to firefox because it is faster, more user friendly and much more secured when compared to Microsoft IE.

Negatives:
1) Too Expensive.
2) Too wordy
3) Too many ads buried in the text.

CONCLUSION: Not worth $25 that I paid for it. Try to get it from a library or read it in a book store before you buy it.

Microsoft rules the desktop. And on that desktop, the most common of its operating systems is XP. Hence this book. Gralla offers a set of tricks, or hacks, as another O'Reilly series would term these, if you want to go deeper into your machine than most of your peers. As he points out in the introduction, the book is random access. Not necessary to read sequentially.

Instead, try perusing the detailed contents pages. From these, you may be able to find a brief title that addresses a need or concern of yours. Like smarter surfing of the Web, cleaning out your browser cache, or finding wireless hotspots.

Hence, if a trick uses Microsoft Word, say, you don't get a full description of all that Word can do. Instead, only enough for your situation. Even in principle, this is not a reference manual. Rather, it complements those.

This book is well worth the price just for the section in the first chapter on how to speedup startup and shutdown and resolve problems with both of them. Most of this information is available on the Internet but why not have it at hand instead of spending hours looking for it?

For the novice to intermediate user this is an excellent way to get things Windows XP under control and operating the way it is supposed to. Well-written, easy to follow, with everything explained in plain English, Windows XP Power Hound is recommended for the average user who wants to learn more and customize their system but will contain little new information for someone who is already a power user.

I picked this up from the library thinking it was going to show me, well, what it claimed: "underused features and powerful tricks and shortcuts that few people have taken the time to probe". I guess I was seduced by the word "power". What I got was a beginner's guide to XP.

PROS:
-Easy to read and find information
-Includes screenshots for visual learners
-Decent start covering the basics for those who know little about XP or the Windows environment

CONS:
-Little information for those who are computer literate and have used XP
-Some of the information is outdated
-Full of plugs for pay-for web services/downloads [...]
The copy I read was copyrighted in 2005, a lot has changed since then...

This is an excellent book. Well worth the money for Windows users. There are a wide variety of helpful hints that will help you get the most out of your machine, and tell you a little about the fundamentals along the way. In particular I found the explanation of how to get laptops to go to sleep very rewarding, probably worth the price of the book alone, because it saved me from reinstalling the OS on what was otherwise a well behaved machine. Other notable helpful hints included information on how to clean up your desktop, speed up networking, fix wireless problems and to block popups.