Upgrading & Troubleshooting Your Mac: ibook, iMac, G3/G4, PowerBook with CDROM (Apple)
Upgrading & Troubleshooting Your Macranks among the best technical books about the Macintosh around. Representing a distillation of the knowledge author Gene Steinberg has gained in his lengthy consulting and writing career, this book reveals details that everyone can use. Best of all, Steinberg explains the workings of the iMac, iBook, PowerBook, and Power Mac G3/G4 in a way that's easy to follow and fun to read. He glosses over the most basic Mac operations (the stuff that's usually obvious anyway, like moving files around) and covers all sorts of intermediate- and high-level tricks. He even explains stuff that you might have thought was the exclusive domain of professionals, such as setting the white balance of your video display and setting up a network so that Macs can store files on Windows machines and vice-versa.The author's presentation style emphasizes "why" over "how," so while you will find quite a few no-nonsense procedures here, you'll probably get more out of his explanations of alternative ways to proceed and strategies for avoiding trouble ("A Handy Guide to SCSI Voodoo" is the title of one section). Steinberg's case studies and notes from his consulting experiences make great reading too. The net result is that it's very likely you'll be able to find something--probably quite a bit--on any Mac problem you may encounter or improvement you'd like to make.--David WallTopics covered: Getting the most from Mac OS 8.x and 9. Error messages, hardware upgrades, printer configurations, fonts, SCSI, networking (including heterogeneous Windows/Mac networks), scanning, Internet access, and display setup. There's a CD-ROM full of neat shareware and freeware too.