We all know that exercise and good diet are requirements for a healthy life — and it’s just the same with PCs. A little bit of maintenance and attention along the way could save you loads of time on the phone to support services. The Healthy PC — subtitled “Preventative care and home remedies for your computer” — takes this approach to computers, too.
The subtitle to Dungeons and Dreamers, ‘The rise of computer game culture’, is clear but doesn’t wholly spell out what the authors of this book are attempting. King and Borland are primarily interested in how gaming has created communities during its history — from school nerds and developer startups to clans of online gamers.
Bored by your beige box? Want your PC to show more of your personality? Perhaps an attempt at modding is in order. If you were a little apprehensive about taking this step, a book like PC Mod Projects is worth considering.
Build Your Own Smart Home taps into Australia’s current home improvement craze, explaining how you can fit your home with time-saving, lifestyle-enhancing technology.
One of the most popular tech topics this year has been digital video editing — and it seems many people have taken advantage of more powerful PCs to make something of their home movies. If this describes you, you’ll probably have noticed that it’s not as easy as it looks.
If you read our feature on Microsoft Office System 2003 in the November 2003 edition of PC World ( page 87) you’ll know that some of the Office suite has changed little. So why buy a book if there are no major changes in big ticket items like World and Excel, you ask? The changes to World and Excel may not be overwhelming, but new features in Outlook for managing your e-mail overload and additions like Infopath could come as a surprise to regular users of Outlook.
Are you a networking guru responsible for keeping your company connected? This book is not for you. But if you have limited to no experience with home networking and want to connect your PCs and peripherals, it could be worth a look.
MYOB may be an ever-increasingly powerful accounting tool, but for many smaller business owners who would rather be out making money than filling in GST details, getting to grips with the software is a time-consuming pain. This latest edition of Making the Most of MYOB, however, continues the use of features that should help ease that agony.
If you’ve read all the scary reports of hackers using the PCs of unsuspecting home users to run porn sites or launch attacks, but aren’t sure what you should do, Firewalls for Dummies could be your knight in shining armour.
Napster and KaZaA made digital music big news, but there’s loads more you can do than just listen to MP3s you’ve downloaded. Van Buskirk’s book will have you creating DJ mixes, running a Net radio station or creating mash-ups.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to stay safe online, with the proliferation of threats and the new and complex ways that cybercriminals can target people.
Ultimately this laptop has achieved everything I would hope for in a laptop for work, while fitting that into a form factor and weight that is remarkable.