It's hard to get all the components required to comply with stringent performance and power-management requirements, and still get into a small case. This job usually requires a custom motherboard and other specialized components, so the laptop owner who wants to upgrade her machine faces a much more difficult task than the owner of a desktop machine with similar desires. A person can exchange your hard drive, add more RAM, and make tweaks in software, but almost everything else requires the addition of external components, which kind of defeats the purpose of a laptop. Mueller was not one that your computer is difficult to do much with, and that your best upgrade procedure is often a visit to an auction site. That said, Mueller does a great job explaining how laptops work - how the engineers went about cramming all the components that generate heat into those miniature chassis in the first place. He also explains many interesting component theory, such as how magnetic hard drives store data and how various DVD standards differ. He explains, for example, how to test a laptop power supply, and why you should consider it a prime suspect in the computer does not work even if the LEDs are lit and the cooling fan spins.