Upgrading and Repairing PCs: Technician's Portable Reference (Scott Mueller library)

Upgrading and Repairing PCs: Technician's Portable Reference is a vastly abridged version of Scott Mueller's excellent (and generally definitive) Upgrading and Repairing PCs, 12th Edition. The idea is that because this book is small you'll be better able to carry it to job sites, without having to invest in a forklift. Mueller cut out most of the material on old hardware, and focuses on motherboards, processors, memory, and other subsystems that have been state of the art since about 1998. This probably means that this book will come in handiest in organizational environments, which are more likely than home users to have reasonably current computing gear.

Murphy's Law dictates, however excellent this book is, that the bit of information you need will appear only in the mother book. On the other hand, the same infamous law also dictates--if you have the mother book at hand--that the information you need will be so obscure as to not appear there. In reality, you probably will be able to solve a fair number of problems with this volume, and rely on Web access at the job site to provide the rest of the information you need. Mueller has done a good job of condensing his encyclopedic work into a more portable format. --David Wall

Topics covered: Wintel PC hardware, documented and explained for technicians who have to diagnose, repair, and upgrade it. All of the major subsystems (including LAN) are covered. Diagnostic trees help locate trouble, and procedures explain, for example, how to recover from a failed BIOS flash. Charts document beep codes, some jumper settings, and variations among SCSI device types.