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Repairing and Upgrading Your PC Review by Min Seok Kim
Farewell to Hardware Headaches
I had my first computer in 1997, and upgraded to a new motherboard in 1998, in 7th grade. Whenever my mom took me to the local library, I would peruse the PC magazines. When I got Internet access, I read hardware reviews on recent startups such as Tom's Hardware (1996), AnandTech (1997), and Ars Technica (1998); and shopped on PriceWatch (1995). The PC upgrade genre is all too familiar to me. I was young back then, too enthusiastic about clicking every menu item on the screen, and absorbed prodigious amounts of information in the process. As time went on, I pursued more academic subjects such as math and physics because, honestly, computers cause me stress.
_Repairing and Upgrading Your PC_ (2006) by Thompson & Thompson takes the stress out of this otherwise fun activity. First of all, the book has a standard outline:
Ch.1-3: introduction
Ch.4: motherboards
Ch.5: CPUs
and so forth. Each chapter is comprehensive. Their bits of advice appeal to a wide range of audience, a feat that online reviews often fail to accomplish. With the exception of a few sections on CPUs, chipsets, memory, and so forth, the book is still relevant in 2008. In this sense, this book is superior to the fragmented Building the Perfect PC, Second Edition by the same authors.
The best aspect of this book is that it helps the reader to avoid costly mistakes. Such valuable information is brewed from experience. For example, it claims that Seagate hard drives are more reliable than Western Digital, Samsung, and Hitachi. I would accept this claim based on my limited experience that two of my four WD hard drives failed - a Raptor and an RE2 WD5000YS.
Its chapter on optical drives is excellent. Finally, knowing its procedure for washing keyboards is worth the cost of this book - as I hate touching oily objects, and the so-called washable keyboards cost at least twice as much as this book.
Highly recommended.