Windows XP: The Complete Reference

By John R. Levine, Margaret Levine Young, Douglas Muder, Alison Barrows and Rima S. Regas.
October 2001, 1100 pages, US$39.99. ISBN 0-07-219297-6

Windows XP is the latest version of Windows, and it's intended for use in corporations, small offices, and homes. It's an update of both Windows ME (Microsoft's home version of Windows) and Windows 2000 (the corporate version), with many improvements on both, and it comes loaded on most new IBM-compatible PCs. Our mammoth book covers both versions of Windows XP: Windows XP Professional and Windows XP Home Edition. We include an enormous range of topics, from configuring your desktop to getting on line to configuring your Web browser to setting up LANs and Internet connections to coercing ancient DOS applications to run. Every page offers the benefits of our hand-to-hand combat with Windows XP, so you can get going and up to speed fast.

Corrections

• Page 30: In the Minimizing Windows section, second line, replace "Bring Desktop To Front" with "Show The Desktop". In the second paragraph, first sentence, replace "Send Desktop To Back" with "Show Open Windows".
• Page 304: The fifth paragraph shouldn't be in quotes.
• Page 458: The Note about handwriting recognition should be on page 303.
• Page 762:View LAN Resources with the Net Command, in the first paragraph, third sentence: Replace the two forward-slashes with two backslashes, like this: "Then type net view \\computername and press Enter."
• Page 778: Under the heading Controlling Access with Simple File Sharing: in the second sentence Change "You can select" to "You can clear". In the third sentence change "Leave this check box blank" to "Select this check box".
• Page 879: In the last bullet, replace "Normal Mode" with "Start Windows Normally".
• Pages 961 and 963: Page headers should say Chapter 40, not Appendix 40.

Updates

• Visit our book's companion web site for updates to the book and new resources we've found since the book went to press.
• Also make sure you visit Microsoft's Windows Update web site every week or two to get the frequent security patches. There are at least 35 so far, as well as a few driver and feature updates.
• The SP1 Update collects nearly all of the updates and patches since XP was released. We use it and it works OK. The update you download from the Windows Update web site is actually just a setup program that looks around to see what updates you've already installed and then downloads and installs the rest. The full update is many megabytes, so be prepared to leave your dialup connection downloading for a few hours to get the whole thing.
• If you've installed SP1, there are already more security patches to install, so go back to Windows Update and get them, too.