Product Description

Upgrading and Repairing PCs is the de facto standard PC hardware tome used by more PC professionals and hobbyists than any other book of its kind - selling more than 2.1 million copies in it's 13-edition history. In the 13th Edition, Scott has pulled out all of the stops, adding hundreds of page of new material, two hours of all new video and more technical illustrations, charts and tables than you'll find in any other PC hardware book.

Deep and balanced coverage of new processors from Intel and AMD, including the long-awaited Pentium 4 and 64-bit Itanium. Own a Dell PC? Interested in not turning it into a charcoal briquette when installing a new power supply or motherboard? What you read here could prevent an untimely meltdown of your beloved PC! Interested in turning your PC into a hot rod game machine? Want to rule the Internet Unreal community with an iron fist? Read Scott's coverage of audio, video and Internet connectivity for the lowdown on supercharging your PC. Use the new troubleshooting index to track down pesky problems with everything from IRQ conflicts to audio quality. Find solutions fast! Ever wonder how data is written to a CD? How do DVDs store so much more information than CDs? Scott brings you the most in-depth look at CD and DVD technology you'll find in a bookstore. Move over parallel ATA...serial ATA is here and it promises to revolutionize the way your hard drives interact with the motherboard. Get the skinny on serial ATA, as well as ATA-6, here first! Scott Mueller on video! You asked for it and you got it. The video on the 12th Edition CD was so well received, Scott went back into the studio and produced two hours of all-new video, showing you step-by-step procedures for building a PC from the ground up, including how to partition and format the disk, load drivers and operating system!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #814415 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1548 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Scott Mueller takes seriously his role as the acknowledged guru of Intel-compatible personal computers, and does an admirable job of making his books compete with Web sites about hardware. He does this by releasing a new edition of Upgrading and Repairing PCs every year, or even more frequently, and by overshadowing the sites with sheer volumes of information. The latest edition of Mueller's respected book, the 13th, is positively massive--more than 1,500 pages of dense text and pithy illustrations, in combination with a CD-ROM that's nearly full to capacity with information. Plus, for good measure, Mueller and his team maintain a companion Web site for late-breaking hardware information.

As you would expect, this edition is updated to include information about the latest hardware developments, including the Intel Pentium 4 and Itanium parts, as well as advances in optical storage technology. Mueller, aware that no computer ever really goes extinct, has kept his page count under control without sacrificing his depth of legacy coverage by putting older material--including the complete text of five previous editions--in Adobe Acrobat format on the CD-ROM. Other refinements include clearer line drawings and other illustrations, and an increase in the amount of how-to video (in Windows Media Player format) on the CD-ROM. The series of videos walks the viewer through the process of building a PC from the case up, and though it's sometimes hard to pick up on details (He plugged that thing into what?), the videos do inspire confidence. The volume of data is staggering, and it's surprisingly easy to navigate.

Gamers and others concerned with extracting every last bit of speed by overclocking and otherwise stressing their machines will probably be happier with the information they find on the Web. Mueller is mostly concerned with building fast but reliable systems, and doesn't touch on really out-there hardware--such as water-cooling systems for AMD Athlon processors--at all. That's fine, because he covers the hardware mainstream with near-absolute thoroughness. Buying this book is like buying a library; every hardware enthusiast needs one. --David Wall

Topics covered: Intel-compatible personal computer hardware (and, to some extent, the operating systems that run on it) from the dawn of PC time (about 1985 through the present day). Processors , motherboards, video systems, storage devices, peripherals--everything that goes inside, attaches t o, or communicates with a personal computer chassis is covered here. Readers become more than qualified to build systems from bare metal, and to diagnose and replace components.

Amazon.co.uk Review
Upgrading and Repairing PCs is more likely to have the answers to your PC hardware questions than any other book on the market. If you're in the business of assembling, upgrading, or troubleshooting machines based on the IBM/Intel architecture, you must have this book near your workbench. The newest edition of this hardware classic contains information on the latest offerings from the chipmakers (including CPUs and support chipsets).

Scott Mueller also has improved his SCSI coverage by including the most complete documentation of SCSI-1, SCSI-2 and SCSI-3, as well as explanations of the pseudonyms by which those technologies go (Wide SCSI, Ultra Wide SCSI, Fast SCSI and so on)--something that's harder to find than you might think. He also includes tables of SCSI signals for troubleshooting purposes, which is rare to find in print anywhere else.

As he always has, Mueller earns points for his clear statements of what connects with what and how. There are tables that correlate standard processor receptacles with the chips (from Intel, AMD, and Cyrix) that fit into them. There are thorough and well annotated lists of memory addresses, beep codes and hard disk specifications. He's used clear line drawings instead of the murky photos that damage many hardware books. Furthermore, he has an excellent writing style that's a pleasure to read. Mostly, you'll value Upgrading and Repairing PCs as a reference, but it includes tutorials on certain topics, including the assembly of a custom PC. --David Wall, Amazon.com

Topics covered: New RAM technologies, new motherboard standards (including ATX), new ATA bus specifications; peripheral goodies such as SuperDisk, re-writable CD drives, DVD drives, and LCD monitors; and SCSI (SCSI-1, SCSI-2 and SCSI-3).

Review
"For professional technicians and hobbyists, this is the most trusted and popular guide on the market."The Bookseller, Aug 2001

Customer Reviews

The best Hardware Book
It is really a complete reference to Hardware and you can find all the information you need from the computer assembling to the last technology (for examplet the Intel Itanium Processor is considered in this book), from low level to the OS hardware control. It explains clearly all the properties of hardware components and the book could be used by a principiant and by a professionist too because the explanation starts from a very simple level reaching gradually the more complicate thematics.
An example about the method used by the author to develop an argument could be the processor Chapter: it starts from the history, continue with the foundamental information about them, then overclocking, Buses, Chache, Instruction (SMM, MMX, etc.) Architectures, Sockets, Voltages, Heat and Cooling, Coprocessors, Bugs, Update Features, talks about every family of Intel and Intel-compatible processors and finally about installation of processors.
It is a must-buy book.

This book will turn you into a pro!
This book has everything that anyone could need for building a PC. The book is 1650 pages long to account for people with no knowledge of computers. It explains everything in acute detail and has an interesting layout. This book is not supposed to be read from front to back. I would describe the layout as a children's "choose your own adventure" book as you find yourself flicking to other pages for reference and perhaps not returning to your point of deviation. The diagrams are brilliant, way better than the dark, non-understandable photos used in other books.

I didnt give this book five stars because of the "choose your own adventure" style to the book as if you read it as much as I did (I read it a lot!) then you find that there are parts of the text which have been repeated many times.

To summarise:

If you want to build a PC from scratch -> BUY THIS BOOK

If you want to repair a PC -> BUY THIS BOOK

If you want to upgrade a PC -> BUY THIS BOOK

If you want to know how the insides of your PC works -> BUY THIS BOOK

General comment -> BUY THIS BOOK

Excellent!
Based on some of the reviews already here I bought this book just a few weeks ago, and I'm happy to say thank you to those who have already posted reviews because this book is excellent!

It has all the information you could want and more, and although as mentioned in one of the other reviews - it does repeat things a few times I found that this was a good thing because it reminded me of the things I had read in earlier chapters, helping to keep things in mind.

If you're one of those people that likes to know all the technical information then this book is for you, it's full of interesting information.

Excellent!