Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book on fine-tuning Windows!
Review: This book has a huge collection of excellent tips for getting the most out of Windows. Every Windows owner owes it to themselves to go out and get this book!
Rating: 
Summary: Good collection of practical tips, marred by obsolescence
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: For Intermediate Users and Up, this book gets results!
Review: 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.
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