| Offering dozens of on-target tips, workarounds, and warnings, Windows XP Annoyances for Geeks allows users to improve their overall experience with the popular XP operating system. And now, with this updated edition, users can also expect detailed coverage of the newly released Service Pack 2 (SP2) technology, which provides protection against viruses, hacker, and worms. It's the ultimate resource for the ever-expanding Windows XP market.
If you're using Microsoft Windows, I shouldn't have to tell you what an annoyance is. To put it simply, an annoyance is a problem to be solved, and Windows certainly has no shortage of those.
An annoyance is the way Windows keeps forgetting your settings, rearranging your desktop icons, and constantly changing the order of items in your Start Menu. An annoyance is the inconsistent way Windows handles the dragging and dropping of files. An annoyance is the fact that Microsoft gave Windows a fancy face lift in Windows XP, but didn't bother to fix a nearly decade-old problem with File Open and File Save dialogs (more on that later). An annoyance is Service Pack 2, which contains as many new bugs as it fixes, and only provides superficial protection in an age of viruses, Trojan horses, and spyware.
More often than not, an annoyance is the result of bad design, as opposed to a garden-variety bug.
But the purpose of this book is not to complain or criticize, but rather to acknowledge and understand the problems and shortcomings of the operating system in an effort to overcome them.
Windows XP Annoyances for Geeks presents solutions that enable you to both customize and troubleshoot Windows. This is an important distinction, because effective problem solving often requires that you know whether an annoyance is an inadvertent bug or an intentional feature of the software, and the dividing line isn't always clear. It's important to realize that if software doesn't act in a way that you think it should, it should be regarded as poor design and not necessarily the result of a bug. A bug is an action carried out by a piece of software that wasn't intended by the designers of the product. Ultimately, this distinction doesn't make any particular annoyance any less annoying, but it goes a long way toward helping you come up with a solution. |