PC problems revealed
By MIKE BERMAN
Scripps Howard News Service
November 19, 2003

PC bashers unite. Steve Bass has written a book.

"PC Annoyances" ($19.95) from O'Reilly & Associates is the ultimate compendium of everything that has caused us to take up arms against our computers, ranging from the annoying RealOne icon that sits in our Windows system tray to dealing with spammers.

For those of you that don't get around much, Bass is a contributing editor to PCWorld Magazine and is the author of the infamous Home Office Newsletter, which everyone should read - at least once.

What separates him from other scribes that profess to know about everything PCish is his ability to put into words what causes our noses to flare and turns our brains into mush every time we have to deal with the one-eyed monsters that sit on our desks.

The book is strewn with tips on how to cope with the day-to-day glitches we face every time we turn on our PCs, some of which I hardly noticed until I leafed through its pages. Now, "I'm mad as Hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

For example, take the way Microsoft Word handles numbered lists. I never realized there was a problem until I read Bass' book. Now it makes me fume every time I think about it!

It seems that Word is "numerically challenged," becoming easily confused when there is more than one numbered list in your document or, somehow, changing the numbering sequence the next time you open your document. Bass has not only defeated this anomaly, but shows us how to prevent it from happening.

In addition, Bass shows us how to:

• Get past glitches in Microsoft Windows, including taking charge of the Windows interface and dealing with the "dreaded" activation built into Windows XP and other Microsoft products.
• Conquer e-mail, from Outlook to Hotmail, including tips on dealing with spam, avoiding mailing lists, sending big files and managing folders.
• Master Microsoft Office, from little-known right-click wonders to automating data entry.
• Discover how to "wake up" DSL, tame your notebook, quiet a PC fan, save data and save paper.
• Shake up Internet Explorer, stop Flash, outsmart defaults, control favorites and add a Google toolbar to Netscape.

Also Bass saves us $5 by not including a compact disk with the book. Instead, he gives us links to various Web sites where we can download useful programs that will make our computing lives easier, including www.oreilly.com/pcannoyances.com. He also uses "snipURLs," which shorten URLs from Web sites to addresses that are no more than 14 characters.

This is a book that every PC user should have sitting on his desk, next to his dictionary (a book used to look up words that our word processors fail to recognize).

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