Comments about O'Reilly Media Windows 7 Annoyances:

I am absolutely convinced now O'Reilly pays for all the gushing reviews you see on Amazon and such. There's no other explanation for how such awful books gets such rave ringer reviews. Karp and friends wouldn't know an "honest" review if they fell over it. Avoid this author. This book is ridiculous. No one should have to suffer through its nonsense.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Windows 7 Annoyances:

I am deploying Windows 7 in a school environment. I enjoyed WinXP Annoyances by the same author and find this book helpful in many of the same ways...."real world" utility and a healthy dose of skepticism regarding "features". Lots of great add-ons and workarounds including URLs for useful free software make the book more than worth the price.

Strong networking chapters..."homegroups" feature thoroughly demystified.

It seems to me that the challenge the IT community faces, after all the years bashing Microsoft for Vista and other buggy, feature-laden products released before they were ready, is to embrace this one...Maybe somebody besides Microsoft should write a book called "Why Windows 7 Is Really So Much Better than Vista and XP that you should go to the Trouble to Upgrade. Now."

Thanks for a very helpful, readable guide O'Reilly and Mr. Karp.

Joe

Comments about O'Reilly Media Windows 7 Annoyances:

I upgraded from XP to Win 7, so I didn't know what to expect. This book was excellent at demystifying Win 7 and explaining how to configure it for practical use.

My only negative is that the "Users and Security" chapter seemed to be unnecessarily hard to follow. It took several readings of that chapter till I understood, and I wish they had just said this clearly and directly: "There are administrative users and standard users. Admin users can install software that changes system settings if they 'elevate' it; standard users can't elevate installers. If this is your own computer, the default admin account is safe for everyday use (unlike Win XP) as long as you don't give privilege to anything that you didn't deliberately install." Sure, all the extra stuff in the chapter is valuable; but I felt like that chapter gave way too much "trees" and not enough "forest".

That chapter was the exception (and it's why I gave the book four stars instead of five). Everything else that I've read so far has been terrific, and after going through about half the book I'm already the go-to guy for other people who have Win 7. I strongly recommend this book; just be aware in advance that you'll have to read chapter 8 ("Users and Security") several times before it makes sense.