A Wild Eyed Salivating Rat? “Windows 7 Unleashed” Book Review

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Windows 7 will be available in October.  If you are a Vista survivor this will be a long-awaited and welcome relief.  And this book will be a nice read as your blood pressure returns to pre-Vista values.  I can tell if a book passes my goodness test if, while reading it, I pause and double-check the name of the author on the front cover.  I found I did this a couple times while reading the first few chapters of “Microsoft (R) Windows 7 Unleashed” by Paul McFedries; SAMS Publishing; 2010; $49.99

win7_w_books_fig2

I’m not so sure that I would have embellished the title with the term “unleashed”.  The terms “unleashed” and “Windows” just don’t mash — it’s like saying “ hey — there’s a giant wild-eyed rabid rat running amok outside gnashing his teeth; let’s take off his leash!!  “Microsoft Windows 7 Less Annoying” might have been a more suitable moniker.  But there are enough tweaks and tips that I found the volume worthwhile nonetheless.  I installed the pre-release candidate of Windows 7 on an “experimental” machine and walked through the first several chapters of Windows 7 Unleashed.  After spending a few weeks with Windows 7 on this experimental box and armed with this book I’m ready and looking forward to the switch in October.

You can find this book on Amazon.

 

Product Information

Price:$49.99
Manufacturer:Sams/Pearson Education
Pros:
  • Has useful tweaks
Cons:
  • None

5 thoughts on “A Wild Eyed Salivating Rat? “Windows 7 Unleashed” Book Review”




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  2. Oh good grief. The only problem with Vista that cause my blood pressure to go up, was all of the freaking press whining about some old piece of hardware or software that had problems with the OS. So that twenty year old serial printer didn’t work, big deal. Vista just was not the steaming pile of poo you all said it was. Sigh.

  3. Nice title. I was expecting a review of an O’reilly book with an actually wild eyed salivating rat on the cover. I have to admit I was a bit disappointed.

  4. I bought a Toshiba laptop in October ’07 that had Vista. It’s still my main computer, and I’ve had no problems with Vista. Many people that have complained to me about Vista on their computers just didn’t have enough RAM. It won’t run well on 512 Meg or even 1 Gig. My laptop came with 2 Gig and I upgraded it to 4 right away.

    I recently installed Windows 7 on an old Dell laptop that I had collecting dust, and gave it to my daughter to try. She seems to like it. I’ll probably put Windows 7 on my wife’s MSI wind and see if it works good on the netbook.

    This was a good review of the “Unleashed” book, I’ll look for it soon.

  5. I work in IT (a large national medical laboratory). With a few exceptions, Vista is resoundly disliked. It’s given us nothing but problems whenever it was deployed. I’m telling you, it’s the new “ME”. We’ve been testing with Win7 RC and it’s worlds better.

    Trust me EVERYONE, Geogray in particular, that you haven’t found any issues with Vista probably speaks of your narrow range of use. At the enterprise level — and even mid-sized enviornments, Vista is in fact a “steaming pile of poo”.

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