Windows Vista Annoyances -- it takes a book

Why is David Karp so annoyed? More importantly, what is he doing about all his annoyances?

Karp has written a book, first published in December of 2007 and already in its second printing, entitled Windows Vista Annoyances, which answers my  first question above and part of the second.  His book addresses the "quirks, unaccountable behavior, and bad design" of Microsoft's Vista OS. It has a wealth of information, with chapters like "Getting Started with Windows Vista," "The Registry," Working with Media," "Troubleshooting," "Users and Security," and much more. A great reference tool.

     

In particular, I took note of Chapter 5: Performance, which covers "speeding up your PC and getting it to work better.Get the new Glass interface working and take care of your hard disk." As Karp points out, "the best way to ensure maximum performance from your drive is to regularly - weekly or biweekly - defragment it." Music to my ears!

Karp details the good and bad of the Vista defragmenter provided by Microsoft, and also highlights PerfectDisk as his third-party defragmenter of choice for its map, advanced settings, and detailed reporting abilities. He further points out that the Vista Disk Defragmenter "doesn't offer anything close to the usability of PerfectDisk." Karp goes on to suggest using PerfectDisk to defragment the paging file.

Windows Vista Annoyances is easy to read, either from start to finish or going directly to a particular annoyance you might have. And a bit amusing too -- for example, Karp doesn't just refer to the startup logo - it's the "pompous Microsoft Windows Vista logo." Writing like that makes it enjoyable to fix the problems. 

Ultimately, the book is about getting things done. Referring to "us lowly Vista users," Karp says we have a choice: "do we continue to suffer with Windows' shortcomings, or take matters into our own hands? The point of this book is to help you solve problems."

It's a good point.

                                     

Comments

[registryfixreporter]

And the Vista registry presents just as many problems as XP. Between defragmenting and registry maintenance, I agree, you're 3/4 of the way home to consistenly better performance.

[atv tires]

I haven't had one problem yet.