Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: Brilliant Windows Vista Pocket Book
A book to help answer the questions Vista inevitably throws up – Ian Waugh sees how brilliant it is…
| Product | Brilliant Windows Vista Pocket Book |
|---|---|
| Company | Pearson/Prentice Hall |
| Web | www.pearson-books.com |
| Price | £8.99 |
| We like | Covers lots of topics, some useful tips |
| We don't like | Rather basic, small illustrations in black and white are difficult to read, no index |
| Rating | 6/10 |
| Requirements |
Let's read the blurb: " .delivers the answers you need when faced with an unfamiliar or problematic task."
So a sort of troubleshooting guide? Well, not exactly; it's more an introduction to Vista than a quick reference guide.
There are 14 chapters, called lessons, and they take you through Vista's basic functions. So we start with installation, customisation, managing hardware and software, connecting to the internet, using Internet Explorer, Windows Mail, creating a home network, managing User accounts, and Vista's multimedia capabilities. It's all rather basic stuff that most users will have discovered from the Vista Welcome Centre and pottering around with the system.
There's a rather short chapter on security which suggests Vista's firewall and Microsoft Defender will keep you secure. No mention of free anti virus and malware software.
The final two chapters cover ways of making Vista faster, and troubleshooting. Performance increases include turning Windows features off (such as indexing), services, and removing background processes. There are warnings about doing this but they seem rather advanced tweaks to include in such a book. It also suggests removing visual effects which can be real resource hogs, but it doesn't suggest which ones. You can remove a good number without drastically changing the look and feel but you're left to work this out yourself.
The troubleshooting section contains useful tips about reinstalling and upgrading Vista (how to install it over XP Professional, for example), and tips on how to get older software and hardware running.
The book is high on illustrations and there are screenshots on almost every page. However, for some reason all the shots are of the full screen, even when the item of interest is only a small box or even an icon! The illustrations are in black and white (which seems quaint now, given that so many computer books are in full colour) and the details are often difficult or impossible to read.
Conclusion
The Brilliant Windows Vista Pocket Book isn't, er, quite as brilliant as the blurb would suggest. Had it been called The Quick Guide To Getting Started With Vista it would have been more on the mark. It's not a bad book. It covers a lot of basic information a beginner to Vista would need to know and if that's you, it's worth a look. But it's not exactly the book the blurb suggests.
