Windows Me Annoyances

Rating:
Summary: Excellent resource.
Review: I found this book to be an excellent resource for the advanced user. It contained many tips that I was able to use to improve the performance of my machine.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent resource.
Review: I found this book to be an excellent resource for the advanced user. It contained many tips that I was able to use to improve the performance of my machine.

Rating:
Summary: Likes & dislikes
Review: I had asumed that this book come with a CD & didn't come with a CD, I was dispointed to say the least. But I like to read the book & learn more about Windows ME & all it's bad points & how to fixes them. I'm glad I had purchased the book.

Rating:
Summary: Likes & dislikes
Review: I had asumed that this book come with a CD & didn't come with a CD, I was dispointed to say the least. But I like to read the book & learn more about Windows ME & all it's bad points & how to fixes them. I'm glad I had purchased the book.

Rating:
Summary: ME Helper
Review: I started my life with PCs using DOS then reluctantly made the transition to Win 3, then 95, then 98 and now ME. Me has a nice new feature or two but that doesn't justify the bloated OS.

This book will help you make your ME computer run and look like a Win 9x computer. It will explain the registry, help you decide what to get rid of, let you change the look and feel of the OS and show you some basic VBS programming. There is much more.

It is a well written book and when I change operating systems I would look forward to another book on it by Mr. Karp.

(There are so many tips in this book it is kind of like having a subscription to about 6 PC magazines and getting the info all at once.)

Rating:
Summary: This is a terrific book!
Review: It probably isn't so good for the computer novice, but for everyone else it is great. It contains a *lot* of "how-to" and "how come?" information about Windows ME that clearly took a huge amount of time to collect. I was pleasantly surprised to find information on more topics than I expected based on the title, such as an explanation of Windows scripting and how to set up various networking scenarios that are not explained in Microsoft's documentation. The writing style is nice and simple and clear -- just as it should be.

Rating:
Summary: A must have for avid Windows ME users!
Review: This book is a godsend - it tells you exactly what you need to know or where to get what you need to get rid of the many "features" of Windows Millennium Edition Microsoft included in them. Learn how to get rid of System File Protection - a dangerous and useless background process. DOS users of old remember the RESTORE command? It's similar to that. I recovered 6 GIGABYTES of space on my 20 GIGABYTE drive by removing SFP. If you're forced to use Windows Me, get this book NOW!!!

Rating:
Summary: Very good for help, tips and explanations
Review: This book will not explain the meaning of all those error messages, but instead will give you solutions for them. It has detailed information on Windows registry, hardware updating, interface customizing and so on.

Maybe one chapter is indispensable to read (the registry), but in most cases, you'll get directly the solution for your problem, without having to read a whole chapter; however, just read it as a textbook and you'll understand a lot about your system.

Most tips and solutions work for the generic W9x (95, 98, 98 2Ed) and some even for W2000. Anyway, the book explains the differences (if any) between WME and the former.

One recommendation: Try one solution or tip at a time, otherwise Windows will not let you know how well are you working.

Rating:
Summary: Windows ME Annoyances makes Windows Easier
Review: Windows Me Annoyances. In this book you will learn how to fix the most annoying things Microsoft ever included in an operating system. If you have Customized Menu's or the slow loading web view on your system then trash them. With this book you will learn how to do just that.

Inside the book you will learn how to get the most from the Windows Registry with these little known hints and tips. Then want to delete or rename your recycle bin or change major system icons or names? Well inside the book you will learn how to do that plus more such as make your system run faster, even go as far as changing the START menu to have the icon you want and the text you want on it using a simple hex editing technique you learn in the book.

Later on in the book you get into the more advanced stuff, the second half of the book is more helpful for the geek then first half which is targeted more at the new user who wants to make Windows more of their own, because in this part you will learn how to use scripts to make Windows more manageable, how to write CGI scripts for a web server, using MSconfig, and a section many people will find helpful a breakdown listing of all the settings in Windows Me.

The geek or even the new user who just put Windows ME on their machine will probably want to pick up a copy of this book as it contains lots of helpful information, tips, tricks and good old registry hacks.

Rating:
Summary: readable, few topics in depth, good insight into GUI
Review: With Windows XP soon upon us, please pity the few hundred thousand ME users who are stuck with a dead-end OS. ME was really only a stopgap solution, a way to implement new features in Win 98 while Microsoft worked on XP. Some of these features included system restore, an image viewer, better multimedia and better hardware support. ME inherited a lot of Win 98 stuff while being new enough to force users to pay for software updates (including Photoshop, Norton Anti-Virus and Home Site).

Typically, a first release of a OS is buggy, and after a few years, it really becomes robust and useful. But after XP is released, it is unlikely that consumers will buy ME anymore or that OEM manufacturers will ship computers with it. It also is unlikely that Microsoft will release a service pack, now that its efforts are focused on XP. That means that the people unfortunate enough to have bought consumer PC's during the intervening year will be using a legacy OS with diminishing support for new hardware and software.

This minority will need to solve problems on their own, using books like this one. This excellent book goes over the differences between ME and 98, ME Secrets and ways to tweak the registry for certain things. The first part is interesting from a usability point of view. It covers the user interface in thorough detail, with shortcuts and insights as to why Microsoft chose a particular solution. ( A good number of these tricks can be found elsewhere, but I found several new ones: such as using Microsoft Family Logon for a security, tweaking the search tool, removing stubborn icons, disabling autorun for CDROMS and stop Windows from randomly checking your floppy drive).

The book contains an excellent appendix on DOS, a fairly thorough guide to what System Restore does and a good troubleshooting guide to hardware installations. It also contains an outstanding discussion of file associations and how to change or preserve them. I also found the section on error messages and general protection faults to be unusually helpful. Several other chapters (which didn't especially interest me) focused on editing the registry and vb scripts to automate windows tasks.

Topics I would have liked to see more coverage on was software installations and plugins. Particularly, removing and reinstalling programs and especially MS Office. Recently I installed and reinstalled Office 2000 and found the error messages from ME and Office very confusing. I realize this is an OS book, not a book on applications, but still it would have been nice to know some procedures for managing software installations. Also, there was not much discussion on Windows Update, which seems to cause a lot of problems.

Perhaps it is unfair to point this out, but the best source of information for ME troubleshooting seems to be news groups and the MS site, not books like these. Although this book was published later than the first dozen or so and seems to be more carefully written, no one can expect it to contain info about the latest bugs and fixes. Newsgroups have informed me about bugs related to Norton AV, Windows Update and helped me figure out the ME doesn't support RAM over 512 MB.(!!!) You wouldn't find solutions to these problems from these books.

Another book I highly recommend is Ed Bott's "Special Edition Using Windows Me," which is a little bigger, a little easier to read, with more more screenshots and a little more thorough treatment of the OS. The Bott book tends to have info about multimedia and extras like msn messenger, while the Oreilly book is more readable and discusses a few topics in depth.