PC Upgrade
by Alan Zisman (c)
1993. First published
in Our Computer Player, April 16, 1993
book review of:
UPGRADING and REPAIRING PCs 2nd Edition
by Scott Mueller
Que Books, 1298 pages, 1992
$43.95
The COMPLETE PC UPGRADE and MAINTENANCE GUIDE
by Mark Minasi
Sybex Books, 608 pages, 1991
$34.95
I don't just write articles for COMPUTER PLAYER. Most
of the time, I
have to work for
a living, just like the rest of us. I'm a teacher at a small
alternative
school, part
of the Vancouver School System. We have 100 students, which is a nice
way to work,
but it means we're on the short end of the stick for anything that's
funded on a
per-student basis.
Like computers.
So when I got a call from Coopers and Lybrand, the big
downtown accounting
firm,
that they had dismantled a network, and would I like a donation of
26 computers, I
was very excited. (Special thanks to Vanessa Fife and John Francis
at Coopers and Lybrand).
These were older technology; a few slower 286s, and a
lot of original
IBM XTs and
PCs. A couple of boxes of cards. Not enough video cards to go around,
and a total
of three hard drives. Getting as many of these as possible up and
running
became my
summer project. Since I'm a teacher, not a technician, I looked for
books to help
me learn what I needed.
These are the two books got me through a bunch of hard
times. (And it
helped to have the
support of my School Board's Media Services repair department, to back
me up...
special thanks to Yvan Ah-Lu and Don Buss).
Both books are aiming at the same audience-- anyone
who has a PC, and
wants to
upgrade it or fix it themself. Neither assume that you're an electronic
wiz... you
don't have to solder anything, or use fancy diagnostic tools. You do
have to be
prepared to open up the case without being intimidated. I'd rate them
both for '
intermediate' users.
They cover many of the same topics... inevitably, as
they're both trying
to do the
same thing. And both have a chatty, anecdotal tone. Minasi says, for
example, "In
general, it's pretty hard to hurt yourself with the PC, short of
dropping
it on
your toe..." (He does go on to point out the few exceptions to that
generalization).
You may not want to read either as light bed-side reading, but that
doesn't mean
that they need to be dry recitations of facts. Of the two, I found
Minasi, a
columnist for BYTE and COMPUTE, more fun to read.
Scott Mueller's book sometimes gives the impression
that IBM is the
only game in
town. In his discussion about video adapters, for example, he dismisses
the common
Hercules mono-graphics standard as not supported by IBM, and thus,
not worth
discussing.
On the other hand, his book is twice the length of
Minasi's, and it
has information on
virtually every IBM model from the original PC to the PS-1s and PS-2s
current up to
1992. When a student pulled up with an IBM XT-3270 terminal emulater
in her trunk,
as a donation, this book let me know what I was looking at.
And despite his IBM-bias, Mueller's is the only book
that discusses
the differences
between the most common clone BIOSs: AMI, AWARD, and PHOENIX.
Unfortunately, neither book has everything. When I
found that memory
parity errors
kept some of the PCs from booting up, only Minasi's book told me how
to use the
obscure error code to identify exactly which chip to replace.
I'd find it a difficult decision if I had to choose
just one of these
books; each
had some invaluable tidbit that the other lacked. Minasi's book is
more readable,
and seems a more focussed. Mueller's book has more raw information
(300 pages of
appendices!). If forced to pick just one, I'd probably go for Mark
Minasi's book,
if only for the better jokes, but I'd hope that I could borrow
Mueller's
from the
library from time to time.