Product Reviews

If you want to use Windows 95 seriously, or train as a Microsoft Certified Professional, then this book is your passport. Its high price means it's best suited to companies who want to train employees at a lower cost, or those who want to become professionally certified - but it's not a book for the novice.

Comprising two large manuals and a CD-ROM, Supporting Microsoft Windows 95 is the official courseware from Microsoft, designed to prepare system engineers and other support professionals to take the Windows 95 MCP exam.

The course is divided into 27 chapters, each of which is divided into several lessons, varying in length from five to 60 minutes. The course starts off logically enough with a detailed discussion of the installation and configuration of Win95, and then discusses the concepts, navigation and customisation of the user interface, and the next few chapters are more theory-based. Topics include an architectural overview of the operating system, the way multitasking and scheduling work, and the usage of physical and virtual memory. Plug and play is also discussed, along with the Win95 file system.

The rest of the first

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volume concentrates on network setup, administration and connectivity. Strangely, Dial-Up Networking isn't covered: it's left almost as an afterthought near the end of the second volume. For those without a good grounding in the terminology and technologies of networks, the necessary background details are supplied in an optional section.

The second volume starts out by discussing Win95 comms capabilities, including the configuration of modems and the setup of the Telephony API (TAPI). Successive chapters explain the printing system, how DOS, 16-bit and 32-bit applications are handled by the OS, what happens when they violate system integrity, and how to performance-tune a DOS application. Following this are topics on the display subsystem, system policy and templates which control the look and feel of the operating system and the supplied disk utilities. Final modules include coverage of the boot sequence, Microsoft Exchange, the Briefcase for file synchronisation, multimedia, troubleshooting and, for the corporate user, the transition to Win95.

With so much detail given in a neutral, terse style, it's easy to get swamped with information. The lessons try to compensate with hands-on exercises to break up the information delivery, and as an added reprieve the CD offers some animated tutorials and video clips. Questions at the end of each chapter help to reinforce the main points; they're also useful for revision.

If you don't need to cover all this material, it's possible to pick your way through the course, as each section carries a list of earlier chapters that should have been completed. If you decide to tackle the entire course, according to Microsoft's lesson timings it should take around five days to complete.