Review: Windows Vista Inside Out Deluxe Edition
If you only buy one Windows Vista book, this ought to be it
| Product | Windows Vista Inside Out Deluxe Edition |
|---|---|
| Company | Microsoft Press |
| Web | www.microsoft.com/mspress |
| Price | £37.99 |
| We like | authoritative, SP1 content, background information |
| We don't like | Not enough on troubleshooting |
| Rating | 9/10 |
| Requirements |
Windows Vista Inside Out Deluxe Edition is an update to an earlier edition that covers changes introduced by Service Pack 1 (SP1) and more. At some 1350+ pages it's one heck of a doorstop and includes a CD containing some additional eBooks, utilities and other sundry extras to help you on your way.
Despite its huge scope of content, it's aimed more at serious users than people who need to support and manage Vista installations although it now has significantly more for corporate management staff than the earlier edition but is no replacement for the Vista Resource Kit.
What you do get are five broad categories covering system setup and configuration, security and networking, digital media, system maintenance and management and advanced system management.
Each section is broken down into dozens of topics, each illustrated with lots of screen shots, step by step guides and a fair bit of background information and tips. As well as being updated for SP1, the book has added a whole raft of additional information totaling some 300 pages of workarounds, time saving tips and background details.
What we particularly liked was the amount of effort in explaining related areas for instance the section on the firewall has a boxout to discuss the meaning of stateful packet inspection. Also,the book is quite happy dropping down to the Command Prompt and issuing command line instructions or running network diagnostics - many books just stick to the Windows tools and bypass the often powerful commands that are available at the Command Prompt.
One of Vista's biggest improvements is the enhanced support for digital media such as audio and video files as well as photos. With a whole section devoted to this, there's much here on all aspects of Vista's tools and applications as well as notes on potentially new areas to some people as CODEC support. We certainly found a few features and tricks we'd missed before.
One area we did feel let it down somewhat was that being a Microsoft book, the majority of WIndows Vista Inside and Out assumes things work as they should and whilst there is some information on troubleshooting, we'd have liked to have seen more on what to do when things don't work as expected or what can be done to improve performance. We've certainly seen the woes a badly written or installed driver can cause for instance.
Vista introduced a large number of new bundled applications almost all of these get discussed at length and here the large number of screen shots help considerably. A number of them have changed significantly since their XP versions and in some cases are totally new so this information is particularly useful.
Conclusion
WIndows Vista Inside and Out Deluxe Edition is a superb book. Possibly it's biggest fault is that it packs in so much that some people, particularly novices may find it intimidating. The writing style throughout is easy to follow, clear and concise and anyone who wants a book that is both timely and covers almost every aspect of Vista in all its incarnations will find this a great addition to their bookshelf and possibly the only Vista book you'll need, especially the more experienced ones who want to take their Vista knowledge to the next level.
The CD-ROM includes the entire book in searchable format so you can keep a copy on your laptop if you're computing is of the mobile nature but is also useful to find information quickly which despite the thorough index can take time sometimes.
The price is fair but the book can be picked up at quite a substantial discount from Amazon and other retailers. Overall, highly recommended.
