Windows® 95 Secrets®

Rating:
Summary: Get this book before you ask me for help.
Review: Before you call me, look at 'Windows 95 Secrets' by Brian Livingston & Davis Straub, This book provides essential, and much undocumented information about Windows 95 features, installation, Plug and Play, boot files, the Windows desktop, relationships to DOS, networking, performance, and more. Helpful for everyone from the neophyte to the most intense power user. A great gift.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent resource.
Review: Before you call me, look at 'Windows 95 Secrets' by Brian Livingston & Davis Straub, This book provides essential, and much undocumented information about Windows 95 features, installation, Plug and Play, boot files, the Windows desktop, relationships to DOS, networking, performance, and more. Helpful for everyone from the neophyte to the most intense power user. A great gift.

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Summary: Windows 95 Secrets towers above the competition.
Review: Getting Deeper and Deeper Into Microsoft Windows 95

By Edward Mendelson

If you want to change Windows 95's new interface and file system so that the generic "My Computer" feels more like your own computer, the one indispensable guide is Brian Livingston and Davis Straub's Windows 95 Secrets.

Unlike most Windows books, this one doesn't make you pay for a rewrite of Microsoft's help files. Instead it reveals undocumented and underdocumented techniques for changing almost anything in the Windows environment. Some of the simpler tips tell you how to customize the list of SendTo and New... items on the right-click menu. Others give you the details you need to use the new wildcard options in Explorer and explain that hotkey choices only work for shortcuts that you place on the Start menu.

The best tips--including the ones you won't learn from Microsoft--send you to the Registry Editor to add or modify entries. This isn't a job for the fainthearted, but if you have the courage, you can stop Windows' distracting and time-wasting habit of making application windows jump visibly from the taskbar to the screen and back again. You can add the Control Panel, Dial-Up Networking, and Printers to your Start menu. Best of all, you can change Windows' annoying habit of putting a tilde and the numeral 1 in the old-style 8.3 filenames that it automatically creates when you use a new-style long filename.

Livingston and Straub explore the depths of the Windows memory management and DOS support. They even tell you when to ignore the advice you get from Windows itself. When Windows displays an error message telling you to increase the Files setting in CONFIG.SYS, they tell you to make a change in SYSTEM.INI instead.

Like most Windows books, Windows 95 Secrets comes with a CD-ROM of shareware and freeware, most of it worthless, but Livingston and Straub one-up the competition by providing a one-stop installation program for virtually all the programs on the disk. If you don't like the one you just installed,

Rating:
Summary: Number 1 in my Library!
Review: This excellent reference manual has become an indispensable corner stone of my computer library. Well written in clear and concise English the book is full of tips and tricks -- many of them undocumented by Microsoft. "Windows 95 Secrets" has helped me through a number of problematic situations including ones having to do with Network, modem, fax and printer setup and trouble shooting. If you are considering the purchase of only one Windows 95 reference book: this is the one.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent resource.
Review: This was a great book - if I had just one book about Win 95, this would be it.