If this book was written about cars, their "Power Techniques" would include how to set your radios pre-sets, reset the trip odometer, and roll down both the driver and passenger power windows by using two fingers to work both switches at once. Knowing how to use your OS as a proficient user is not a utilizing "field-proven secrets of the pros", as the back cover would have you believe.

The first section of this book is devoted to teaching you how to configure, find, and launch control panel applets (mostly using the GUIs - really), followed by an overview of the Tweak UI add-on Microsoft provides as a standard free download. Another section includes an overview of how to open and read items within the registry (using the standard registry editor) which does not go into any specific configurations or tweaks, but rather on an explanation of what you are looking at and a warning about messing with it. Subsequent sections cover such things as controlling which applications start up, managing local users, installing devices, configuring the Explorer, configuring the Windows Media Player and ?getting the most of the Internet Explorer?. None of these sections include anything which is not done through the Microsoft provided interfaces and which wouldn?t be covered in an "Introduction to XP" style book.

The book also includes an entire section "devoted" to scripting Windows (30 pages). Like so many other books that cover scripting, the section is not going to leave the reader with the ability to script anything and is more likely to confuse and ?turn off? any desire to learn more.

Essentially, there are many excellent titles which serve to introduce a new user to Windows XP (such as ISBN 0782140769), as well as titles which will actually teach "power techniques" to a user (ISBN 0782141145 and ISBN 078214067X). This title is misleading to users already familiar and comfortable with Windows XP and better titles will prove more useful to any user who really wants to master the OS.