An operating system is a piece of software that should do its work in the background while you do your work in the foreground. In an ideal world, that's precisely how an operating system would work. In our world, however, operating systems constantly get in our way. They annoy us. And few are more annoying than Microsoft Windows 98. Perhaps you're annoyed with the icons that Windows deposits on your desktop and that you never use. Or you're frustrated with the new elements of the Windows 98 interface. Or you consider Windows 98's central feature, its integration of Windows and the Web, to be a massive inconvenience.

With Windows 98 Annoyances, you can put an end to these and countless other annoyances. Given the book's format, which presents particular problems and immediately offers one or more solutions, you can quickly identify the Windows 98 features that most annoy you and equally quickly provide a fix for them. In the process, you'll take charge of Windows so that it works the way you want, rather than the way that Microsoft or some other software publisher has configured it.

Based on the author's extremely popular Windows Annoyances web site www.annoyances.org, Windows 98 Annoyances provides an authoritative collection of techniques for customizing Windows 98, including:

• Useful keyboard shortcuts that let you work with Windows 98 more efficiently
• Techniques for working with the Windows registry, the database of system and application-specific configuration information
• Available third-party software and utilities that handle some of the more complex workarounds and customizations
• Dealing with software applications that overwrite your file associations without warning
• A discussion of scripting with the Windows Scripting Host as a means of eliminating many of the Windows 98's annoyances to be the definitive resource for customizing Windows 98.