Windows 7 For Dummies corrections

To see your book’s printing number, turn to the copyright page — the one with all the legalese — and look at the page’s bottom for numbers like these:

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The last number in the row is your book’s printing number. (As an example, the numbers above mean the book’s a rare first printing edition, the one highly sought by “For Dummies” book collectors.)

Missing Windows Key symbol. (Fixed in second printing)

For some mysterious reason, the Windows Key symbol — the symbol atop the key that fetches Windows’ Start menu — is missing from these paragraphs:

Chapter 3, page 68, fourth paragraph, missing twice.
Chapter 6, page 117, fourth paragraph.
Chapter 8, page 164, last paragraph.
Chapter 14, page 264, first paragraph in Step 1.

Chapter 2, page 46, Hibernate mode uses less power than Sleep mode. (Fixed in fourth printing)

• Hibernate: Found on some laptops, this option copies your work to your hard drive and then turns off your PC — a process requiring more less battery power than Sleep mode.

Chapter 3, page 68, third paragraph. Aligning two windows onscreen. (Fixed in second printing)

Windows 7 offers a new way to place two windows side by side. Drag a window against one edge of your desktop; when your mouse pointer touches the desktop’s edge and the window’s shaded edges fill that side, let go of the mouse button. Repeat the process with the other window along the other side of the monitor.

Chapter 8, page 152. Revisit Favorite Places section.

The first step should read like this:

Step 1. Click the Add to Favorites bar icon (shown in the margin) on Internet Explorer’s toolbar, and click the Favorites tab.

Chapter 9, Windows Live Mail

About a year after Windows For Dummies hit the shelves, Microsoft released a new version of Windows Live Mail. The updates will appear in the book shortly, but this post explains some of the differences you’ll find when trying to e-mail photos.

Chapter 9, page 174. Windows Live Mail’s menu button is on the left side, not right.

You can reduce your 30-minute wait by clicking the Menus button along the program’s top rightleft, shown in the margin…

Chapter 10, page 206, Encrypting your PC with BitLocker (Fixed in fourth printing)

The sidebar about BitLocker neglects to say that the BitLocker feature is only available on Windows 7’s Ultimate and Enterprise versions.

Chapter 19, Page 367, Step 16. Don’t plug in your portable drive just yet… (Fixed in third printing)

Step 16 should be trimmed to read like this: Click Next, and unplug the drive from your old PC, and plug it into your new PC.

(You plug in the drive in Step 18, which is listed correctly in the book.)

Chapter 21, page 386, second-to-last paragraph. Windows XP owners can still buy Windows 7’s Upgrade edition. (Fixed in second printing)

Windows XP owners can also buy the upgrade disc. Unfortunately for Windows XP owners, upgrading to Windows 7 means wiping their hard drive clean and starting from scratch.

Appendix A: Page 394, Table A-1. Windows Vista Home Basic owners can also upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium. (Fixed in third printing)

The book left out the words “Windows Vista Home Basic” next to Windows Vista Home Premium. Owners of either of those Vista versions may upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium.

Appendix A: Page 395. To upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7, Windows Vista must have Service Pack 2 installed. (Fixed in third printing)

The third bullet, near the page’s bottom, contains the two references that should be changed from “Service Pack 2” to Service Pack 1.”

Appendix A: Page 397, first paragraph. Windows XP upgraders must reinstall all their old programs. (Fixed in second printing)

• Make sure that Windows 7 recognizes your software. Run all your old programs to make sure that they still work. You may need to replace them with newer versions. Windows XP upgraders must reinstall all their programs from their original disks.

Appendix A: Page 398, last paragraph. Windows XP upgraders must reinstall all their old programs. (Fixed in second printing)

From here, the installation steps are identical to the steps in that section. Except, unfortunately, Windows XP owners must end their Windows 7 installation by reinstalling all their programs from scratch.

Appendix A: Page 397, section added to chapter’s end. (Added to second printing)

A Safer Way to install Windows 7 over XP

If your Windows XP hard drive is less than half full, take these few extra steps for a safer switch to Windows 7.

In Step 3, insert your Windows 7 DVD, but don’t restart your PC. Instead, double-click the DVD’s Setup file to start the Installation process. Choose Go Online to Get the Latest Updates (Recommended), accept the license terms and click Next.

Then, in Step 8, select your Windows XP partition, but don’t choose Format. Just click Next. As Windows 7 installs itself, it saves your PC’s old XP files in a folder called windows.old, which can be retrieved by a repair shop should something go horribly awry. If the installation goes fine, however, delete the windows.old folder to give Windows 7 more room.

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