| 12 August, 2005 |
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Hardware |
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| PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition |
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| PC Hardware in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference relies on an eternal truth of the computer industry: legacy systems never die. This book focuses on the technologies that have provided Wintel personal computers with various capabilities over the years. Like most of its competitors, this book addresses the PC on a subsystem level, and deals with video cards, hard-disk interfaces, memory, and other pieces of the componentry puzzle that hardware integrators need to figure out. The authors do a great job of explaining the differences between (and relative merits of) IDE and SCSI hard-drive interfaces, various video buses, competing processors, and other technologies. They also prove themselves adept at explaining general assembly procedures and troubleshooting strategies. |
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| Upgrading and Repairing Laptops |
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| Laptops--call them notebooks, portable computers, or whatever else you like--are tightly engineered items. It's hard to get all the required components to obey stringent performance and power-management requirements, and still fit into a small case. The job usually requires a custom motherboard and other specialized components, and so the laptop owner who wants to upgrade his or her machine faces a much more difficult task than the owner of a desktop machine with a similar wish. One can swap out the hard drive, add more RAM, and make tweaks in software, but almost everything else requires the addition of external components, which kind of defeat the purpose of a laptop. That's the message the reader takes away from Scott Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing Laptops. It's not Mueller's fault that such computers are hard to do much with, and that your best upgrade procedure is often a visit to an auction site. |
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| The Book of Overclocking: Tweak Your PC to Unleash Its Power |
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| The Book of Overclocking is the definitive guide to the art of running a PC's processor faster than the manufacturer intended. You learn how not to fry your system while pushing the speed on everything from the Pentium 2 to the latest Athlon XP and Pentium 4 processors. Entire sections on cooling, troubleshooting, and benchmarking make sure you get the most out of your machine. |
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