This is a blockbuster with forty pages of detailed contents alone, plus separate chapter contents listings. The idea of this is to enable you to locate any of the 1,200 problems and solutions that the book covers. You can also access them via a forty-page index, or the web support at http://support.microsoft.com.
The contents are structured on the simplest possible basis. First the problem is named: "Explorer causes page fault". Then it is described: "This fault occurs when..." or "Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem...". Then a number of possible solutions are offered: "Restart your computer using...". In fact it's a mammoth compendium of problems which have been accumulating at Microsoft's Help Desk.
They have been submitted by people with every conceivable type of accessory, peripheral, or cross-connected hard or software which has failed to dock or interact with Win98. We know that Microsoft are famous for releasing software before all the bugs are removed, but at least they seem to do a good job of archiving the solutions provided during what amounts to public beta-testing. This sort of publication will be an invaluable resource for someone in technical support, manning a help desk, or involved in upgrading from Win95 to Win98.
The logic of the chapter sequence escapes me. 'Starting Win98' comes in chapter fourteen, but then maybe it doesn't matter in what is essentially a work of reference. I tested it out by looking for the problem of files defaulting to date order rather than alphabetical - but couldn't find an answer. I re-started my computer instead - and that fixed it.
