Book details of 'Peter Norton's Complete Guide to PC Upgrades'

Title	Peter Norton's Complete Guide to PC Upgrades
Author(s)	Peter Norton, Michael Desmond
ISBN	0672314835
Language	English
Published	January 1999
Publisher	Sams

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Amazon.com info for Peter Norton's Complete Guide to PC Upgrades

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virtualbookcase.com score: 5.0   Vote for this book

The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'Peter Norton's Complete Guide to PC Upgrades':

Reviewer amazon.com wrote:
For the uninitiated, deciding whether to upgrade your existing computer or buy a new one can be excruciatingly difficult. There are a number of things to consider: the advantages of memory upgrades, of adding more hard disk space, or of a new monitor (and probably a new video card). And, of course, cost figures into the equation. In Peter Norton's Complete Guide to PC Upgrades, Second Edition, Peter Norton and Michael Desmond assess the value of hardware upgrades in depth. They also provide good general directions on how to physically add memory, add or replace a hard disk, and install almost any other type of hardware found in today's PCs. As in the previous edition, each chapter covers a particular hardware topic, such as modems. Within each chapter, Norton and Desmond explain the hardware technology and buying strategies and offer generic guidance on upgrade advantages and disadvantages. This book offers complete, concise information that will enable readers to make informed choices about their computer hardware. The guide contains a thorough glossary, making it easy for the new computer user to understand all of the acronyms that wholesale retailers use. Even experienced users will find the discussions of such topics as memory and digital connectivity illuminating.
Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
Part one is an introduction, but it's really more of a once-over- lightly than a set of background materials. Successive chapters provide a "what is a PC" (with a very heavy emphasis on PC99, bringing to mind the MPC of yore), a look at Windows 9x (saying that it's "secure"!), a rather tentative review of what you can upgrade, some troubleshooting tips, and a wee bit of a buyer's guide. Base components are discussed in part two, looking at CPUs, memory, power, and motherboards. The material is not very detailed, with recommendations seeming to be made by fiat. Much the same is true of the storage content, with drives, controllers, and tapes being loosely covered in parts three and four. In the same vein, part five's scan of multimedia tells you that a lot of neat stuff is available, but tends to be shy on detail, and not to warn you about potential pitfalls down the road. Part six's look at connectivity just seems to presume it will all work, a dubious assumption at best when dealing with communications. The final section in part seven collects leftover bits like printers, keyboards, cameras, and scanners. Reading back through that, I have left the impression that there is no content to this book at all. At 750 pages, of course, that isn't true. However, while there is lots of discussion, it is truly astonishing how little hard information is contained in the book. And every time I went looking for a point in regard to specific problems I have had in recent years, it wasn't there. The overall impression I get from the book is of an oversized edition of "The Computer Shopper," with relatively few products and even less price info. On the first page of the first chapter, we are told that "no one knew," in 1981, that the IBM PC would make a big splash. While nobody could have predicted the specifics and size of the current computer market, everybody knew, as soon as IBM made the announcement, that the PC was going to be big. (There is also a fairly wide of the mark misrepresentation of the deal with Microsoft for MS-DOS.) There will, of course, be those who object to my raising these points in this review, since the book is a technical reference, and not a history. That observation is true. However, the historical inaccuracies simply serve as the first examples I saw of a rather cavalier attitude towards research, substance, and definitude. Since the text is directed at those who do not have a serious background in computing, and have to rely on its information, it is difficult to recommend a work that starts off by getting it wrong. In fact, I really don't think I can recommend this book at all. Short works like Myles White's "How to Avoid Buying a New Computer" (see reviews) are thin on the ground, and a bit venerable, but this book isn't that small anyway. In view of the huge superiority of Mueller and Zacker's "Upgrading and Repairing PCs" (see reviews) in only twice the pages, I cannot see an advantage for this book at all. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1999
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