Bigelow S Build Your Own Pc Pocket Reference

From Stephen Bigelow, the #1 author in PC hardware, comes a handy, step-by-step pocket reference to building your own customized PC. He explains in easy-to-follow detail how to choose your components, assemble them quickly and efficiently, test the system, troubleshoot, take advantage of upgrades, and install your operating system.

"If a student researcher had only one handbook on their bookshelf, Miller and Salkind's Handbook would certainly have to be it. With the updated material, the addition of the section on ethical issues (which is so well done that I'm recommending it to the departmental representative to the university IRB), and a new Part 4 on "Qualitative Methods", the new Handbook is an indispensable resource for researchers." Dan Cover, Department of Sociology, Furman University The book considered a "necessity" by many social science researchers and their students has been revised and updated while retaining the features that made it so useful. The emphasis in this new edition is on the tools with which graduate students and more advanced researchers need to become familiar as well as be able to use in order to conduct high quality research.

The answer book for true technicians ... From desktops and towers, to monitors, busses, hard drives, keyboards and joysticks, chipsets, media drives, sound cards, and video adapters, Bigelow's PC hardware desk reference is the serious troubleshooting reference that covers all the latest technology and hardware.

Computer Confluence is more than a textbook. It is the confluence of three information sources: an illustrated textbook, a multimedia CD-ROM, and a dynamic World Wide Web site.

Bigelow explains, in great detail, how each subsystem of an IBM-compatible PC works. In the BIOS section, for example, he details the actions, in sequence, taken by various popular BIOS routines at boot up. The CD-ROM section describes exactly how to make a bootable CD-ROM that takes advantage of the El Torito standard. In other chapters, he takes on video monitors, processors from all three major vendors, DVD drives, diagnostic beep and power-on self test (POST) codes, modems, and tons more. Throughout, he combines excellent how it works text with bountiful reference material. Bigelow also has paid considerable attention to troubleshooting, concluding each chapter with statements of common problems and their solutions.A Symptoms at a Glance section lists common problems, along with references to the pages that describe what to do about them. This is a useful feature, but it would be easier to find a particular problem if the list were broken up by subsystem.

The hugely popular, bestselling Pocket Reference series has been extended to cover one of the major problems faced by PC technicians--Drive and Memory. Designed as a technician-level reference, this pocket-sized guide covers all the essential information needed to diagnose and repair common computer storage systems.