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Rating: 
Summary: Sharp! Very Sharp!
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Incredible, but be ready to work for it.
Review: I am an experienced windows user, and I bought this book because I figured it was cheaper than upgrading my PC. I run a K6 266 overclocked to 300, 160 megs of ram, 7200 RPM 27 Gig HD. Once I implemented ALL of the tricks in this book (This is no easy task... it takes a lot of time, and is very high maintenance), my system out performed my ex-girlfriend's Pentium III 850 with 128 megs of ram for applications (not for games, though it still does those well). I don't mind making the effort, but some people might. If you have lots of time, and you love customizing your PC, you can't go wrong. Litestep, registry hacks, DOS utils, 5 partitions on a HD... if you like this kind of stuff, get the book! If you don't know what any of these things are, you may be better off upgrading you PC.
Rating:
Summary: Incredible, but be ready to work for it.
Review: I am an experienced windows user, and I bought this book because I figured it was cheaper than upgrading my PC. I run a K6 266 overclocked to 300, 160 megs of ram, 7200 RPM 27 Gig HD. Once I implemented ALL of the tricks in this book (This is no easy task... it takes a lot of time, and is very high maintenance), my system out performed my ex-girlfriend's Pentium III 850 with 128 megs of ram for applications (not for games, though it still does those well). I don't mind making the effort, but some people might. If you have lots of time, and you love customizing your PC, you can't go wrong. Litestep, registry hacks, DOS utils, 5 partitions on a HD... if you like this kind of stuff, get the book! If you don't know what any of these things are, you may be better off upgrading you PC.
Rating:
Summary: Buy this book, well worth it!
Review: I first bought this book a year ago, and have used what I learned to optimize computers that I would have normaly considered obsolete. It's allowed me to put off having to upgrade untill the new memory standard (DDR) comes out in march, saving me lots of $. I also bought copies for friends this year (2000) for X-mas. Some may say it needs updating, but the authors web site has all the info you would need updated. Many thanks for the Book Dave! .............Curtis
Rating:
Summary: a book that gives you more than performance
Review: I use computer frequently, but I am not that of an advanced user. This book really brings me into a higher level of understanding about how Windows works. The author goes into lots of detail about what happens while Windows is running (e.g. during boot up). Yet, the text is very easy to be understood. This book also gives me a new way to look at computing. A faster CPU doesn't always give you a faster computer. If you think your computer is too slow, THERE ARE things you can do to make it runs faster. When performance matters, you have to give up things that you are used to, but not usful. (I can't complain that my computer is too slow when I am using a fansy theme that costs too much memory.) Also, this book does not simply tell you what to do. The author's explaination enables me to make decisions on my own. This is not a book that simply tell you how to improve your computer's performance. If you have some experiences in using Windows and want to know more about the operating system, this is a nice size book that can get you started. What's more? My machine is faster now. :)
Rating:
Summary: a book that gives you more than performance
Review: I use computer frequently, but I am not that of an advanced user. This book really brings me into a higher level of understanding about how Windows works. The author goes into lots of detail about what happens while Windows is running (e.g. during boot up). Yet, the text is very easy to be understood. This book also gives me a new way to look at computing. A faster CPU doesn't always give you a faster computer. If you think your computer is too slow, THERE ARE things you can do to make it runs faster. When performance matters, you have to give up things that you are used to, but not usful. (I can't complain that my computer is too slow when I am using a fansy theme that costs too much memory.) Also, this book does not simply tell you what to do. The author's explaination enables me to make decisions on my own. This is not a book that simply tell you how to improve your computer's performance. If you have some experiences in using Windows and want to know more about the operating system, this is a nice size book that can get you started. What's more? My machine is faster now. :)
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: Excellent book on fine-tuning Windows!
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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