A note from the author:
This ain't no coffee table book, it's a survival manual.
When we were first kicking around the idea for this book, Dan, Jim (T.J.), and I had a long chat about the title. We knew the book would bridge several audience and computer book categories. The conversation took place late one night as we tried to set up a new system. We were all experienced and computer savvy, yet what should have been a simple chore was taking hours and drawing on all our collective years of experience. It went something like this.
"Arrrghhh! The factory created a boot partition on C: and dumped all the rest of the stuff on D:. We'll need to repartition the drive and reinstall all the pre-loaded software from scratch. Only there's no media supplied for the OEM utilities. We'll need about 40 diskettes to create a set of working disks. How does the average person cope with this?!?"
"It's a shame that someone who just shelled out several thousand bucks has to deal with inane problems like these. We should write a book. Tell anyone who'll listen that there's hope for them; you know, grab the reader by the collar, look 'em right in the eye, and fervently say, 'You can take control of buying, owning, and using a PC.'"
"Right, anyone can. It doesn't matter if it's a pastry chef starting her first business in need of a PC for accounting and customer records or my dad--an attorney with plenty of smarts, credentials, and business experience but no direct PC experience--who wants to write his autobiography. Both these folks need a new PC but for very different reasons. Hey, it could be someone who's already owned several PCs. But the common thread, guys, is that veteran users have already been disappointed by the never-ending aggravations that come with owning a PC, and novice users are about to be disappointed... by those very same issues."
"So the mantra is like this, 'Veterans already have been disappointed and novices are about to be disappointed,' or how about just, 'Everybody's disappointed.'"
"Then we ride up like the cavalry with our book in hand and explain how not to be disappointed anymore, or for the first time, or ever again, whoever you are... how to fight back, how to get some return on your PC investment, and have fun reading along to boot."
"Cool. So we're going to write about PC ownership issues that nobody ever writes about, but that everybody experiences!"
"Exactly. This ain't no coffee table book, it's a survival manual."
"We'll shout the unvarnished truth from the highest soapbox. We'll admonish hardware manufacturers--and Microsoft, of course--for not making things easier. We'll admonish users for not doing their PC housekeeping chores. We'll confess when we ourselves slack off, and explain how we combat our own lethargy. We'll tell 'em everything they need to know to survive and prosper in PC-land. Let's call it The Naked PC. Everyone can picture the PC sitting there, naked like a neophyte, ready to invade your life if you don't take control first. Sure, that'll work. Plus the adjective 'naked' will conjure up meanings like distilled, essential, pure, and primary. There's even the 'emperor's new clothes' angle. So when we expand the series to software categories and strive for retail domination, a customer scanning the shelves will see a title like The Naked PC and immediately think--like in a Rorschach test--truth, disclosure, revelation, undocumented, essentials."
"Say, that's a pretty wide audience. You know, everyone who's ever bought a Wintel PC could use a copy of this book. And everybody who's going to buy a Wintel PC could use a copy. Let's see, that's well in excess of 100 million PCs worldwide plus the double-digit millions who buy new PCs each year. Let's get crackin'."
We pitched the idea as The Naked PC to our publisher (Macmillan) who brought the book into the fold of their Unofficial Guide series so the first print version was called The Unofficial Guide to PCs. But the series title "The Unofficial Guides" changed hands and we took back the publication rights to our book and put it on a CD-ROM. The book-on-a-disc format (PDF) let us make the entire text of the book searchable! Buy your copy now and enjoy! (The title The Naked PC survives as our free bi-weekly electronic newsletter.)
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