Peter Norton's Complete Guide to Windows 98, Second Edition

by John Mueller, Peter Norton, John Paul Mueller

Book Overview

Peter Norton's Complete Guide to Windows 98, Second Edition is yet another comprehensive, user-friendly guide in the highly acclaimed Norton style. Its unique, hands-on, step-by-step approach teaches... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0672316935
• ISBN13: 9780672316937
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: Sams Publishing
• Length: 99998 Pages
• Weight: 2.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.9" x 7.3" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

When you need to know, it's here.

Despite the fact that Millenium and Win2K have been released, for support folks the version of Windows we most often encounter is still Win98. This book has just about everything you need to know about Windows 98 right there between the covers.Unlike one of the other previous reviewers, I found the background and theory portions of the book to be incredibly useful in figuring out just what has gotten out of whack with a system that is giving me fits. The explanations of memory usage, peripheral drivers, and FAT32 should be required reading for anyone who does more than word processing on their computer.

A lot of good material buried in theory.

The plus of buying this book is that you get a lot of useful information. There were few questions that I couldn't answer by reading a bit. I found that the information was much better organized than the Microsoft documentation and more complete as well.In addition, the author provides really good productivity tips that have made working with Windows a pleasant experience. I usually don't have a lot of time to waste getting things done, so anything that helps me work more efficiently is welcome.The big negative for this book is that the author spends a lot of time discussing theory. He'll talk about how things work for pages at a time. While this is OK if you have a lot of time to read, it's time consuming to dig through pages of theory to find the one piece of useful information you need. I did find the theory useful, so I can't say the author was completely wrong in adding it to the book, I just wish all of the theory had been included in separate sections so I could ignore it.I gave the book five stars because it is an essential reference despite the organizational flaws. Any book that can fix as many problems as this one can deserves high marks. Perhaps the author will include less theory the next time around.

Good in depth coverage, but hardware is somewhat dated.

I'm a home user and was tired of reading books that were obviously designed for use by someone in an office somewhere. This book is a very refreshing change from those stuffy books I've read in the past. The author has done an outstanding job of covering all of the new software features for Windows 98 SE. I found everything I needed to know from a usage and theory perspective. In fact, I found that the author provides more information in many places than I actually need today, which means this book will continue to help me well into the futuer. Since that's the point of this book, I give it 5 stars.However, the author goes farther and provides me with a lot of hardware information. None of the information is wrong, it's just dated. The book doesn't include all of the connectivity options that are available today, so I feel that it doesn't provide everything it could in the way of hardware information.So, if you're looking for a book about hardware specifics, look somewhere else. If you want to learn how to use Windows 98 SE, this is a great book to add to your collection.