Optimizing Windows for Games, Graphics and Multimedia (Paperback)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

'Verdict: An invaluable guide to getting the best out of your PC, explaining the whys as well as the hows. This is a must-have for anyone wanting to squeeze more performance out of their ageing PC.' PC Pro, July 2000

Product Description

Every Windows user has spent many frustrating hours trying to figure out ways to optimize system performance. Understanding Win 9x and tuning it to be more efficient can be very time-consuming. This book gives you the tips and tricks you'll need to make your system run faster than ever before, and you won't find them in any Windows documentation. Optimizing Windows for Games, Graphics and Multimedia will answer your questions and save you wasted hours of searching and experimenting on your own computer to find the practical solutions you're looking for. While other books might teach you how to be more productive with the user interface, they don't talk much about system optimization. Whether you use your computer in a home or office for business or games, with Optimizing Windows for Games, Graphics and Multimedia you won't need to dig through hundreds of pages to come up with a small handful of tips. This book does that work for you and presents it in an easily referenced format.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 291 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (December 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565926773
• ISBN-13: 978-1565926776
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,877,721 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good collection of practical tips, marred by obsolescence, November 19, 2001

By	Paolo Marino "pamar" (Torino, TO Italy) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is an attempt to collect (and organize) a series of tricks to speed up Win9x machines (it does work for Windows 95, 98 and ME, but most of the advices do not translate to WinNt and Win2000, as the author honestly points out).

The author's idea is that you can actually obtain a lot of performance even from older machines, if you are ready to do some work for it (tracking down utilities, testing different configurations, dropping some "cool effects" in the standard UI and so on).

I've recently applied the book ideas to "renew" a couple of very old machines (a 486-based, 24MB ram Compaq portable and a Pentium-75 with 64 MB Ram). I am not a Windows Guru by any stretch of the term, and I did learn a lot on how Windows is organized in the process. This fact alone is probably worth one extra star in my rating.

The book is clear, and is a good read (i.e. it is not a simple itemized lists of tricks, but tries to tie up things in a coherent thread).

Unfortunately, the end result of my attempts to optimize my two museum-quality machines were less stellar than what other reviewers submitted. I think that the main reason is due to the fact that most of the tips seem to be aimed at computers which have been subjected to a lot of "install-the-new-software-gizmo-I-just-found-in-this-magazine-CD".

If you start from a clean installation (or work on a machine on which little extra sw was installed) there seems to be very little gain from applying most of the techniques offered by the author.

Another problem is that both SW and HW are a moving target, so when you try to obtain some of the utilities which the author recommends, for example, you may find out that the current versions may have grown new requirements which makes installing them on an older machine a little troublesome.

This is even more obvious when we talk about RAM or other HW specific issues.

All in all, I'm pleased with the book, but mostly because helped me to better understand how Windows works. People who already have a lot of first-hand experience in installing and maintaining Windows machines would probably give this book three stars at most.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For Intermediate Users and Up, this book gets results!, June 6, 2000

By	James Bow "Writer, The Unwritten Girl" (Kitchener, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Written for people who have some experience with tinkering with their computers, this book is loaded with ideas on how to squeeze out the best performance from your machine. Tips range from the obvious, like "turn off your fancy Windows gadgets" to the more complex and eyeopening. Thanks to this book, I've partitioned my hard disk into six separate drives, cut down on fragmentation, noticably sped up my machine and have made things more stable, I believe.

For dissatisfied Windows users who want better but are too scared by the complexities of Linux, this book will give you a good road map to a better computer. It requires some effort on your part, but you won't get lost.

My own machine is a Pentium III 450, with an 18 Gb hard drive and 128 Mb of RAM. The book's tips are especially useful for lower end machines, but they still produced noticable results on a machine that was top-of-the-line just a year ago.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Just What I've Been Looking For, February 1, 2000

By	J.H. Ricketson (San Pablo, California) - See all my reviews

I am about halfway through Optimizing Windows and I haven't yet been left hanging with an unanswered question or something that is too dense to really grasp. It meets all of my criteria. It's hard to get excited over non-fiction works, except poetry - and that is an arbitrary classification. Yet I often find myself mentally exclaiming Yeah! Right on, Man! Tell it like it IS! as I read through Optimizing Windows. IMO, the author can be proud of it. Good job. Very useful for anyone that wants a better Windows than Microsoft provides. Farquhar's tips, tricks, and solutions really work.