Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Somewhere inside these 645 pages is a terrific computer book desperate to get out. Unfortunately, the useful tidbits are buried by the jargon, disjointed outline, and the wince-inducing writing. The authors say "functionality" instead of feature, "enabled" instead of On, and (I kid you not) "circular in nature" instead of "round." But it's even worse that huge chunks of Windows Vista get no coverage at all! Here are a few topics that don't appear in the book, or at least the index: Scanning. Faxing. Flash drives. Monitors. Dial-up connections. Safe Mode. Hibernation. Filename extensions. Network projectors. ReadyBoost. Dynamic disks. Shadow Copy. Burning CDs or DVDs at the desktop. Problem reports. Driver rollback. Driver signing. Ease of Access Center. And there's no information at all about Vista's amazing new speech recognition--only a passing reference in the Tablet PC chapter, even though it works on any Vista PC. So if you get this book, you'll also need ANOTHER book if you want comprehensive coverage of Vista. Meanwhile, huge swaths of the book are padded by pointless tables and listings. Do we really need *26 pages* of symbol-font printouts? Or a half-page table that explains the difference between Small Icons, Medium Icons, Large Icons, and Extra Large Icons? (The table says that "Medium Icons are similar in style to Large Icons, but smaller." Wow, really!?) There are lots of illustrations, but most are full-screen shots, shrunken down to to fit the page. The result is that you can't read any of the text in them. The authors of this book clearly know a lot. But they should have been paired up with writers, editors, and indexers who could help them set that information free.