Once again, I’ve gone and selected a monster tome from O’Reilly to review on their Blogger Review Program. And once again, after months wading through it, I’m impressed.
I’ve owned a few Inside Out volumes over the years, so had high expectations, and I wasn’t disappointed. Whatever you want to know about using Windows 7, you’ll find it in here.
Novices can start with Part 1 which introduces the OS, goes through installation and basic configuration, explains how to find your way around, personalise your settings, add and remove programs and the like. The sections then delve progressively deeper into the nuts and bolts of Windows 7, all nicely divvied up according to what you might be trying to do in particular: organize your content, backup/restore, share media, set up a home network… Experts can skip towards the back of the book for the finer points of networking, security and tuning your system for optimised performance. Every section details the variations you can expect between different versions of Windows 7, so it really is a one-size-fits-all solution. If you’re on Starter at home and Ultimate in the office, it’s all covered here.
Even after more than a decade and a half using Windows, there was stuff in here for me to learn, and I might be kidding myself, but I’m almost positive my laptop has been more responsive and less badly behaved since I worked through some of the tuning tips.
Highly recommended to users of Windows at all levels.
You can find out more about the book and order it direct from O’Reilly here.
