Braised Lambchop
a nurse trying to work while suffering with chronic pain - she rambles a bit

I don't like to critique books about Mac hardware and software. I usually defer to my little brother and other friends to do serious ranting. Tonight, while looking at a new favorite marketing blog, I decided I had to make a stand.

I can't blame Todd Sattersten, the author of the marketing blog. He's a newbie, and all those who once ran Windoze and now use Macs understand how interesting that transition can be, and he's looking for any good advice he can find. In this case, though, the boy is seriously misguided into thinking this article has good advice, because O'Reilly has let him down.

The article is a 12-step program for increasing your Mac's performance, given at O'Reilly as a tease for a new book they've published called 'Degunking Your Mac', written by the same author, Joli Ballew. O'Reilly is a good publisher, but I have no idea why they bought this book, because if it's anything like this article it's a complete waste of money and time.

I almost stopped reading at item 1 of her program, because she gives herself away as a Windows expert - she tells her readers that they need to defrag the hard drives on their Macs every four months.

Dear new Panther users: Please, for the love of God, do not defragment your hard drive, period. When Panther installs a program or writes a file, it does its own version of defragmenting for you. You don't want to go messing with where Panther puts the data. If your performance slows, close all your programs and restart the computer. Just trust me and do not get a defrag program. This hint alone made me want to run for the hills.

She also wants you to get rid of all the unnecessary icons on your desktop and to remove all the unnecessary icons from the Dock that you can. What in the world does the number of icons in the Dock have to do with system performance? Does she tell me? Nope. Her general premise is 'less is better,' and 'the Mac runs just like Windows only it's more expensive.' You'll also be happy to know that spam slows system performance. Now I'm laughing out loud.

But then she starts talking about dangerous things, like removing fonts you don't want. Here's where she really gives away the store, because instantly you can see this woman doesn't have a clue about the Mac. See, Panther needs some fonts in order to function correctly or smoothly, and you can't just go deleting fonts you don't care for. She says you should 'concentrate' on fonts from programs you've added, but the beginner Mac user doesn't know how to tell which is which, and any advice to mess with the fonts unless you know what you're doing is reckless.

The security advice she gives is naive and completely based on Windows experience, especially since she ignores the real Mac security issues of the past few months and focuses on spyware and virii. There is the obligatory backup advice, without a clue about the choices available to OS X users - she suggests going to VersionTracker and taking your chances. And finally, you should know that there are six steps to OS X migration, and backup isn't one of them (although transferring your fonts to OS X is a must-do). She takes a swipe at printer manufacturers for not keeping up with new versions of an OS. She must have a crystal ball, so she can tell those manufacturers just exactly how to 'keep up' with an OS that hasn't been written yet.

In frustration and some irritation, I went to Ballew's author profile to see what else she's written, and what do I find? A article about 'degunking Windows' and four Windows books. And she used to teach high school algebra, too.

While Ballew's advice about making backups frequently and using passwords is good, the rest of her advice clearly comes from someone with even less Mac knowledge than I have. There are already comments about this article at O'Reilly about the stupidity of the article, and I agree with them. Some things are better left unsaid, and I have a bad feeling that many beginning Mac users will take too much of this to heart, have bad results, and then blame Apple. It's not Apple. It's authors who think that all operating systems are equal.

I can't speak about this author's knowledge of Windows. But she doesn't need to be writing more books about Panther until she knows more about the system.