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Hardware in a Nutshell
by by Robert Bruce Thompson Barbara Fritchman Thompson, Reviewed,by Eb Guenther, February 2001 HAL-PC Magazine, , ebg@guenther.com, - June 18, 2001 at 20:58:09:
Last October, O’Reilly published what appears to me to be the most useful book they have ever produced. If you have ever thought about building your own PC, and you can read a technical book without dozing off, PC Hardware In A Nutshell provides a ton of useful information for the do-it-yourselfer.Robert and Barbara Thompson, the authors, describe PC components and sub-systems in terms of their functions and how to select them for upgrading or building a system from scratch. You can learn about all the different features of motherboards (chipsets, slots or sockets, bus speed, CPU speed, voltage, memory types, etc). You can find out about the advantages of the Giga Hertz CPU, what it takes to support it, and do you really want to bother. You will even find out about such mundane parts as power supplies and cooling fans.
You could also over-dose on technical jargon, confuse yourself with too much information about PC components, and decide to buy ready-made, when you discover all the decisions you need to make for which this book could not provide clear answers. But, if you can get past the jargon-laden sections of text, you may suddenly realize that you know a lot more about PC hardware than you did before. Unfortunately, the decisions don’t get any easier as your horizon expands.
The first two chapters are introductory in nature, but give you more useful information per page than any other part of the book. They are chock-full of good information and common sense tips about PCs, subsystems, and how to work on them, or even what to do with the “boat anchor” you would like to upgrade. If you don’t agree with me that the book is worth its $30.00 list price for just these two chapters, I’ll eat my Marzipan hat. No, you can’t have a bite.
The last two chapters (25 and 26) are step-by-step instructions for designing and building a PC. You could just follow the authors’ recommendations in the last two chapters to build your own PC and be done with it.
The 22 chapters on sub-system (3 to 24) do get a bit hairy. They cleared up some puzzling aspects of PCs for me, but I found them to contain more details than I wanted to know. You may even discover that you suffer from technophobia and really don’t want to get this close to hardware. On the other hand, if you are not confused, this book may confirm what you have long suspected — that you already are a PC expert.
PCs are highly complex machines. Their most complicated parts are the motherboards and the processors. So, it is not surprising that the chapters about motherboards and processors are the most confusing chapters in the book. The Thompsons recommend their “picks” based on experience, rather than testing. The only tests they published compared three Intel Pentium IIIs (600, 600E, 600EB) and motherboard combinations using laboratory benchmarks. These might mean something to a few readers, but I would have preferred more practical comparisons, such as spreadsheet calculations, database searches, or file transfers. In fact, the authors admit that they were “unable during extensive actual use to notice any performance differences based on differences in memory benchmarks” (p 107), and recommended Celerons for all but high-end systems, rather than the Pentium IIIs from the tests. Why publish tests only to discard the results? But don’t let that keep you from getting value from these two chapters.
In addition, the motherboard picks were hampered by the absence of the latest technology at the time they wrote the book (they finished in June 2000; the publishing date was October 2000). Thus, they could only provide tips on what features to look for in upcoming CPUs and chipsets.
With so many different kinds of memory modules being sold, I found the chapter on memory a “must read” for the “roll-your-own” crowd. The Thompsons explain the acronyms, when to use which memory, and even when not to use all the memory a board supports (surprise: some motherboards may actually operate slower with maximum memory). Not all their advice is good — they suggested that they had mixed gold with tin contacts (memory and socket), claiming they had never experienced any problems. If you take this as a go-ahead to use gold plated modules in tin plated sockets (or vice versa) and operate your computer in a beach-front cottage with the windows open and lose both your motherboard and your memory chips to corrosion by electrolysis, contact the authors with your findings. They have their email addresses in the book (wink).
Despite the few shortcomings I recommend PC Hardware to anyone who wants to mess around with PC hardware, is thinking about upgrading, or rolling his own.
PC Hardware in a Nutshell
O’Reilly, Sebastopol, 2000
List price $29.95
(street price $25)
US.
Eb Guenther is a long time HAL-PC member.
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