Troubleshooting, Maintaining & Repairing PCs combines authoritative reference material on IBM-standard personal computers with condition-specific troubleshooting advice. Author Stephen Bigelow provides loads of technical reference information but combines it with how-to advice that clearly derives from experience in the hardware repair and upgrade industry. An update to popular earlier editions, this book includes new information about the latest processors and peripherals. As he always has, Bigelow distinguishes his work with coverage of hardware jobs others shun, such as the safe disassembly of a video monitor.

The most intriguing feature of this book is its "Symptoms at a Glance" section, in which Bigelow lists hundreds of conditions with references to the pages on which he discusses them. The descriptions of the symptoms are good--"A device driver small enough for the available UMA fails to load there" and "A 096xxxx error code appears" are two examples--but finding your problem in the list can prove challenging because the symptoms are grouped by the chapters in which they appear. Your best bet is to scan the table of contents for the chapters that discuss the likely sources of your problem, and then scan the symptoms listed for those chapters one by one. Once you've found the reference to the appropriate page, you'll be impressed by Bigelow's tight prose and the depth of the experience he shares. --David Wall

Topics covered: The boot process, BIOS variations, motherboards, processors, persistent storage (including magnetic hard disks, CD-ROM drives, and DVD drives), buses, ports, input devices, monitors, and multimedia peripherals. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.