Troubleshooting Your PC Bible

An unfortunately large percentage of the population regards repairing a personal computer as comparable in difficulty to fixing a Boeing 747. The truth is, it's not nearly that hard--anyone can debug the components that make up a modern PC. Troubleshooting Your PC makes the task easier by providing readers with information on the systems that make up an IBM-compatible microcomputer.

This book excels at providing background information on various kinds of components. It also does a fine job of decrypting acronyms and explaining how different subsystems relate to one another. The authors attack systems--such as the video system, disk drives, and serial devices--individually, listing symptoms, likely causes, and potential fixes for each. Unfortunately, they don't outline solutions in much detail: they advise replacing your hard drive in certain situations, for example, but don't adequately describe how.

Some of the information in these pages seems stale--there's no explicit explanation of how to install RAM modules, and there's no mention at all of modern PC-100 RAM. Similarly, the authors neglect not only the Intel Pentium III but also the well-established Celeron and Xeon chips. It's as if they updated an old edition of this book a little too cursorily. A companion CD-ROM includes a collection of software, plus an evaluation version of Symantec Norton Utilities 3.0. --David Wall