PC Hardware Buyer's Guide »

Robert Bruce Thompson is a coauthor of Building the Perfect PC, Astronomy Hacks, and the Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders. Thompson built his first computer in 1976 from discrete chips. It had 256 bytes of memory, used toggle switches and LEDs for I/O, ran at less than 1MHz, and had no operating system. Since then, he has bought, built, upgraded, and repaired hundreds of PCs for himself, employers, customers, friends, and clients. Thompson reads mysteries and nonfiction for relaxation, but only on cloudy nights. He spends most clear, moonless nights outdoors with his 10-inch Dobsonian reflector telescope, hunting down faint fuzzies, and is currently designing a larger truss-tube Dobsonian (computerized, of course) that he plans to build.

Barbara Fritchman Thompson is a coauthor of Building the Perfect PC and PC Hardware in a Nutshell. Barbara worked for 20 years as a librarian before starting her own home-based consulting practice, Research Solutions, and is also a researcher for the law firm Womble, Carlyle, Sandridge, & Rice, PLLC. During her leisure hours, Barbara reads, works out, plays golf, and, like Robert, is an avid amateur astronomer.

This book is designed for readers who want to build PCs rather than buy ready-made, name brands. The first section, "Choosing Components" constitutes 91% of the content, and the remaining two chapters present a buying guide and a list of recommended sources. For 17 components (e.g. case, power supply, processor, cooling, motherboard, memory, disk drives, etc.) the desirable and currently available technical features are described, followed by a "what to buy" section, which provides specific recommendations citing manufactures' names and model numbers. These very useful recommendations are classified by various objectives for a PC: least cost, business use, high performance (e.g. gaming), small size, least noise level, among others. Some information is as current as January 2005. However, because information in a book such as this will go out of date quickly given the dynamic state of computer technology, the publisher should consider producing it annually. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR