BKPCFAKT.RVW 940114 Addison-Wesley Publishing Company Kelly Ford, Promotion/Publicity Coordinator Heather Rignanesi, Marketing, x340, 73171.657@Compuserve.com P.O. Box 520 26 Prince Andrew Place Don Mills, Ontario M3C 2T8 416-447-5101 fax: 416-443-0948 or Tiffany Moore, Publicity tiffanym@aw.com Bob Donegon bobd@aw.com John Wait, Editor, Corporate and Professional Publishing johnw@aw.com Tom Stone, Editor, Higher Education Division tomsto@aw.com Philip Sutherland, Schulman Series 74640.2405@compuserve.com 1 Jacob Way Reading, MA 01867-9984 800-822-6339 617-944-3700 Fax: (617) 944-7273 5851 Guion Road Indianapolis, IN 46254 800-447-2226 "PC First-Aid Kit", Jerome/Taylor, 1994, 0-201-62627-6, U$24.95/C$31.95 I would recommend that any large office with a number of PCs have a copy of this book. However, I do have some provisions. There is a lot of useful and helpful information here. There is also a lot missing, and a general tone that might give the user just enough information to be dangerous. The book is arranged by symptom, as most computer fix-it-quick guides are. The symptoms tend to be slightly more generic than some other books, so the explanatory sections are consequently longer and a bit harder to work through. I would recommend that those using the book rely on the detailed table of contents to short list things to check. The material is divided into chapters covering the power-up sequence, files and directories, printers, keyboards and input, monitors, memory, viruses, Windows, DOS error messages, and repairs. There are appendices for editing CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT and Windows INI files, as well as a DOS command reference and a listing of the utilities with the included disk. Most of the advice, as I say, is very useful. The, "How to talk with the nerds in tech support," section is a wonderful piece, and I wish every PC user would read it before making a call. The problems lie not so much with errors of fact as with errors of omission. For (many) examples: when dealing with intermittent power problems, the book dismisses the difference between $20 surge suppressors and $200 line conditioners. I assume the $20 devices to which they refer are the power bars "with surge protection." I've had one of those since I got my first home computer. Worked fine with the old Apple clone, but the PC clone demanded more. Got a $200 line conditioner, which worked fine until I moved to an area with a lot of brown-outs, and now I need a UPS. Power filtering is more complex than they let on. Under "Can't create a file," they do mention that the directory might be full. They don't mention the specific limits: 360k and 720k disks will hold only 112 files per directory (or 111 if you have a disk label). It is much more common to run into this little known limit than to run out of disk space; programs usually tell you about low disk space. Under "No picture," there is no mention of the standard motherboard switches 5 and 6 which control whether the video card has additional BIOS (like VGA) or not (like the older CGA). When discussing the creation of a basic CONFIG.SYS file it recommends that BUFFERS=20. A common mistake: very few realize that, because of the way buffers are assigned, BUFFERS should be divisible by eight. Eight is generally fine, sixteen is plenty, unless you have very specialized applications. They will tell you. The DOS reference gives the ATTRIB syntax for DOS 4 or higher; below that it doesn't work the same way. (Of course it is always hard to say where to draw the line on these things. I would suggest, however, that the above examples add little to the length of the book, and a lot to the value. There are other, similar, gaps in the text.) Chapter eight, "Viruses", are of special interest. The material here is not too bad. The authors are even aware that BBSes are not the major enemy. There are a few faux pas: the Stoned message is, "Your PC is now Stoned," and is seen very rarely; "Legalize Marijuana," is never seen. More important is the recommendation that scanners are the only type of antiviral worth having, and the McAfee Associates bias. Interestingly, the Microsoft antiviral (misnamed MSCAN) is put down because it is older than the version of SCAN on the included disk, but there is no mention of keeping SCAN up to date. The disk included with the book contains SCAN, a CMOS recovery utility, Xtree disk manager, a file undelete, a disk physical scanner and a system statistics and information utility. Yes, this book is very handy for those, "Bad command or file name" type questions. It is not very complete, however, and it definitely *is* opinionated. Recommended, as I say, but with reservations. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994 BKPCFAKT.RVW 940114 ====================== DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" (Oct. '94) Springer-Verlag