BKWDIDNM.RVW 940112 PeachPit 2414 6th St. Berkeley, CA 94710 510-548-4393 fax: 510-548-5991 800-283-9444 tbooth@peachpit.mhs.compuserve.com "The Macintosh Bible What Do I Do Now Book", Rubin, 0-940235-23-4, U$22.00 Computers do weird things. *Lots* of weird things. Usually the first thing to do is to find a knowledgeable friend. However, if it is three in the morning, here is a knowledgeable friend who won't mind being consulted. The book starts with three chapters on basic Mac operations. Chapter four contains tips on trying to avoid trouble. The remaining chapters deal with the usual types of error messages and alerts that you see. There are chapters for startup problems, hard disks, floppy disks, printing and viewing files, copying files, erasing objects, printing, networks, and other sundry topics. The advice is sound and usually good, but it isn't exhaustive in all cases. As only one example, the book tells you that if you get an error when trying to initialize a disk, that the disk is probably damaged. However, you may wish to try some very simple tricks first. Check that the disk "door" is not stuck. Check that the disk turns freely inside the housing. Spurious magnetic traces on the disk may prevent the initialization process from completing; wipe a magnet (a strong fridge magnet is usually OK for 5 1/4" but 3 1/2" usually needs something just a little stronger) over the disk to eliminate such traces. (This is, of course, the only time you mix disks and magnets.) Generally speaking, this is a very helpful work which lives up to its subtitle of, "What to do instead of panicking." copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994 BKWDIDNM.RVW 940112 ====================== DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" (Oct. '94) Springer-Verlag