Preface

Do You Need MOM98?

The old order changeth, yielding place to new.

--Alfred Tennyson, The Passing of Arthur, 1869

What makes The Mother of All Windows 98 Books--MOM98 for short--different from the other five hundred or so Windows 98 books on the market? Three reasons. First, it's the only book that shows you what's really going on inside Win98, from a user's point of view. Second, it's the only place you'll find hundreds of unique tips--and straightforward, down-to-earth explanations--for configuring Win98 to work for you, not against you. And third, it's the only Windows 98 book on the market that was written from the ground up based on the final, shrinkwrapped, shipped version of the software.

It continues to amaze me how many books on store shelves are based on very, very early beta-test versions of Windows 98--and how many books amount to nothing more than minor rewrites of their Windows 95 versions. While it's true that Windows 98 looks a lot like Windows 95 from the outside--you know, pointing and clicking and all that--the simple fact is that Win95 has gone through major, even apocalyptic, changes on the inside. While you might not bump into those big changes the first time you use Win98, by the end of a week I guarantee you will.

And then there are all those books and magazine articles that say, "Windows is great but it won't do this and this and this." We spent months figuring out new ways to make Win98 do what the experts say it can't and making it cookbook-easy to put those tricks to use. Whether you're supporting a company full of Win98 users or simply sitting at home and trying to get the bloody thing to start, MOM98 shows you hundreds of ways to make Win98 work better, faster, easier, and more reliably, the first time, every time, day after day after day. And we do it all in plain English.

For those of you who cut your teeth (if not your fingers) on Windows 95, we have a chapter designed specifically to bring you up to speed on Windows 98--with a curmudgeonly emphasis on what does and doesn't work. Not all of the "improvements" Microsoft talks about radiate sweetness and light. In fact, if you don't know where the problems lie, you might find yourself wasting days of effort and hundreds of bucks on Win98 features that just plain don't work.

On the other hand, Win98 has an enormous array of new features that do work--and you need to know about them, too. Some of the most important new features are buried so deep, you'd never find them without a guide map. And that's just what our first chapter provides: knowledgeable, detailed discussion of what to look for and where.

Windows for Dullards NOT!

If you're looking for a book to show you how to push the Windows 98 Start button, well, you're in the wrong place. The Win98 tutorial shows you all you need to know to get started, and the proliferation of built-in Windows Wizards can run you through the most common procedures. For nearly all the "click here, drag there" basic stuff, Windows online help shows you step by step what you need.

But Windows 98 is such a rich environment and the provided docs and online help so skimpy, you'll need MOM98 just for its collections of tips and pointers, its plain-language explanation of what's really happening, and its authoritative exploration of Win98's seamier side. The shortcuts you find on just about any page of this book will save you lots of frustration every time you boot up.

Manual Labor

At this point you're probably wondering, "Why doesn't Microsoft tell us about all these cool, albeit weird, things?" Or maybe "Why should I pay for a book when the documentation I already have undoubtedly covers all the important stuff--if I ever get around to reading it" Or "Why doesn't my favorite aftermarket Windows book give me at least some little hint that all this funky stuff is going on under the covers?" Let me clue you in on a little behind-the-scenes stuff, a few of the dirty secrets of the publishing biz.

First, all the official Win98 documentation and all the aftermarket Win98 books were written before the final code for Windows 98 was ready. That means that everything on the bookstore shelves and in the shrinkwrapped Win98 box-- including the official docs, the Help files, and the Wizards--every bit of it is based on beta-test code and an idealized concept of how Win98 should work, once/if all the problems were resolved.

MOM98, in blazing contrast, was written by, for, and with the final, shipping Win98 product. That made us last on the bookstore shelves and probably hurt MOM98's sales, but it was the only way we could be sure you'd get the straight story.

Second, the aftermarket books are based almost entirely on the official documentation. Where the Windows Resource Kit or online Help is wrong or ambiguous, virtually every book glosses over those points--or are wrong or ambiguous. Mom wouldn't let us get away with parroting Microsoft, even if we wanted to. She wields a mean rolling pin. We went back to original principles, as the saying goes, and reported only on what we could see: what's really there, as opposed to what somebody thought should be there.

More than that, we had a chance to talk with many of the Windows designers and developers to pull together detailed descriptions of how the final, shipping product works, how each individual piece really functions, and how the pieces fit together in the overall scheme of Win98 things. We worked meticulously to make sure all the details are right, so when you have to figure out a solution to your own problems, you can rely on the most accurate information available anywhere--right here on these pages. You won't find these kinds of detailed, accurate, no-bull explanations anywhere else.

Third, the amount of documentation Microsoft produces--and it's the Microsoft documentation that drives the rest of the book-writing industry--has dwindled away. Consider the decline and fall of the windows manual.

Windows 2.0	568 pages
Windows 3.0	640 pages
Windows 3.1	754 pages (with 104 in the Getting Started booklet)
Windows 3.11	477 pages
Windows 95	95 pages
Windows 98	129 pages

Microsoft claims that they are backing away from longer manuals because readers don't want them, but that's a bunch of hooey. Their real goal is to drive down the COG--Cost of Goods. Paper manuals are the single most expensive part of the whole equation. Look at it this way: if shipping a 129-page manual instead of a 750-page manual saves $2.00 a package and 50 million copies ship . . . well, that's some nice pocket change, yes?

Mom's Point of View

MOM98 is more than an encyclopedic reference of the reality behind Win98. It's also a book for that proverbial rainy day: the day Win98 won't boot up at all. The day one of your Registry settings goes haywire. The day you delete or move a program and can't figure out how to get it working again. The day you need to do something Windows' designers didn't think of. The day you want to do something the designers thought you shouldn't be allowed to do.

If you want to get under Windows' skin--whether for the sheer pleasure of understanding what's happening in that box on your desk or to ward off the sheer terror of a machine that won't work right--this is the book you need.

MOM98 concentrates on the parts of Win98 that are hard to "get"--the tough concepts underlying Win98 font technology, for example, or what a Shortcut really entails. You'll find never-before-seen tips on how to make Win98 work better, on how to customize it to support the way you work. You'll see how the Desktop connects to your applications and how folders control what you see on the screen. You'll learn how Win98 starts itself, and what's really happening in Safe mode. You'll see where vestiges of Windows 3.1 and even DOS creep into Win98, and how a rudimentary knowledge of those "archaic" operating systems can keep you out of a whole lot of hot water.

And if you've ever tried to understand the Registry--the single repository of all Windows knowledge, where all the bodies are buried--by using the incredibly unenlightening official documentation in the Windows Resource Kit or online Help, you'll appreciate MOM98's unique, detailed report on what we found there . . . including all sorts of errors in the WRK, the Help files, and just about everywhere else we looked. A very large part of Chapter 3 and practically all of Chapters 8 and 9 work directly, down and dirty, with the Registry. That's more than 200 pages of Registry stuff, much of it previously unpublished. Now you know why we say that The Mother of All Windows 98 Books contains The Mother of All Registry Books.

Most important of all is what you won't see: the Microsoft Party Line. MOM98 doesn't crib from the official, often erroneous, Windows manuals and books: it's a fresh, untainted look at what's really happening in the Win98 ooze. Mom, Woody, and I would sooner starve than serve up rehashed Redmond cant.

What you'll find here is the straight story, as best we can tell it, about the most pervasive, most important computer program ever created. In short, we think that every single Windows 98 user beyond the "What is the Start button?" stage needs MOM98. Sooner or later, it'll save your butt.

Enjoy!

Woody Leonhard
Coal Creek Canyon, Colorado

Barry Simon
Los Angeles, California