Bigelow's Computer Repair Toolkit

Finally, a book for hardware diagnostics-and-utilities junkies. If you've ever wished you had a utility for performing a burn-in on a new system, swapping one IRQ assignment for another, testing an on-board speaker, verifying the performance of a parallel port, or any of a hundred other hardware-related tasks, get this book. Its accompanying CD-ROM comes packed with scores of programs (mostly shareware) that do these tasks and many others.

On the CD-ROM, don't look for a lot of SCSI optimization utilities or Fibre Channel diagnostics. Bigelow focuses his effort on programs that make simple, common tasks easier. A word of caution: Some of the utilities here also make it really easy to render your computer inoperable, so be careful! The text mainly takes the form of documentation for the utilities and diagnostics on the CD, including charts of command-line switches.

One might argue that in the age of Plug-and-Play, when operating systems are supposed to identify and resolve hardware conflicts and inefficiencies, command-line problem-solvers such as the ones included with this book would be obsolete. Not so. Windows NT still doesn't support Plug-and-Play, and Windows 95 doesn't always get things right. Those facts, along with the fact that most computer professionals have to support old machines, guarantee that this book will be relevant for some time.