PC Annoyances (How to Fix the Most Annoying Things About Your Personal Computer), by Steve Bass.

This book is loosely organized into seven (7) broad categories:

• Email: approximately 27 pages, further broken down to include General,
• Outlook and Outlook Express 5 and 6, AOL, Eudora and Hotmail
• Windows: approximately 25 pages, no further breakdown
• Internet: approximately 24 pages, further broken down to include Browsing, Google and Instant Messaging
• Microsoft Office: approximately 37 pages, further broken down to include
• Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Outlook Express
• Windows Explorer: approximately 16 pages, no further breakdown
• Music, Video, and CDs: approximately 18 pages, further broken down to include Music and Video, CDs and DVDs
• Hardware: approximately 12 pages, no further breakdown

Also in the page margins are various tips, quips and interesting bits of information, some whimsical and silly, but most of real value.

I don't think this is the kind of book that anyone would read from cover to cover, but there is a lot of useful and thought provoking information on such a broad spectrum of annoyances and anyone who has spent any time with a PC, can appreciate why the title is PC Annoyances. Not all fixes for the annoyances are free or even something that can be done without some specific piece of software, but he uses a good mix of commercial, shareware, freeware and already installed, though hidden, software and tweaks to help you make your computing experience better and a little less annoying.

In the Email section, Steve puts the "Cardinal Rules of Email" in the first margin and I wish everyone adhered to those rules, with as much email as I get without subject lines or having to read three paragraphs before I can tell what is going on. I also liked the fix for sending shorter URLs in email, http://sinpurl.com a free site and a couple of others I didn't know about.

The Windows section had a few gems in it, such as creating a bootable XP or 2000 CD with the latest service packs merged into it, so all you would need to download after the install with it would be those that came in after you set it up; and my favorite how to keep Windows Update from showing all those updates I don't really need or want each time.

Internet items that caught my eye included a way to look under the asterisks to see what your password is, in case like me your memory has failed you and how to clear dead links from your Favorites.

Microsoft Office didn't really have anything useful to me but if I had 2002 instead of 2000, that probably wouldn't be the case, from what he was showing on some of the things they don't work the same as in 2000 or prior and in some cases not at all.

Windows Explorer's section had a lot of things for me, probably because I have so many different files and folders in different places for different things, which creates a lot of annoyances if you can't figure how to get from here to there or find what you want quickly. One easy thing is to use quotes around the file name in the save as box to keep NotePad from appending a TXT extension to the file name, useful when creating down & dirty html files.

Music, Video and CDs didn't have anything for me, because I am just not into that.

The final section Hardware, was a disappointment to me, but there is so much hardware of various types, I guess it would be hard to really to it justice in a section, rather than a whole book unto its own.

All in all, there was a lot more useful information, to me at least, than I have been accustomed to finding in these kinds of publications. I have found myself going back every time I get a little break at work to see if there is any little tweak or fix I might have missed. You won't use all the information provided, but I am sure you will find something you didn't know and even some things you didn't even know annoyed you, until Steve mentioned them.