Monday, October 20, 2003		Book Review

Hardware oriented troubleshooting book
Sarabjeet Singh Kanwal
Introduction to PC hardware and Troubleshooting by Mike Meyers. Tata McGraw-Hill edition. Pages 460. Price Rs 395

MOST of the university computer degrees and diplomas are software oriented and provide just a little bit of information on hardware. A person who has to work with computers for whole of his life must know hardware components and common troubleshooting (TS) methods.

A reader can learn about hardware through this book that has been written keeping a common man in mind. The language used is simple and lucid. The book takes help of illustrations, step-by-step tutorials, tips, warnings, notes, keyword lists and chapter summaries. It then tests knowledge of students with the help of multiple-choice questions, key-term quiz and lab projects.

The book teaches about CPU, RAM, motherboard, expansion buses, data media and also how these are connected through a framework. Motherboard is a component that binds the whole system. Graphics enable a reader to recognise components in his/her computer. Some graphics of internal components have not been printed clearly.

History of computers from 1968 to 2002 is graphically illustrated. Here you will find functions and way of working of a CPU combined with RAM. Similar details of motherboard, RAM and BIOS are also available. Chapters on installation, upgradation and troubleshooting of these parts are worth reading.

A complete chapter is dedicated to functions and types of expansion buses. Next you will learn various types of power supplies, cases and connectors. Floppy drives, zip drives super disk drives, hard drives, compact disks and DVDs have been discussed in details.

The book also details a reader on CD burning; burning speeds and the way an autoplay CD is made. A chapter explains major SCSI components. Read the book and get ready to fiddle with animation and graphics. The working of a monitor, the latest display device technologies and video display software are also there. A good video card with a right video RAM is required to play an animation correctly.

The book has chapters on input devices like keyboard, mouse, trackball and touch pads. It also has chapters on microphones, video cameras tablets, touch-screen, sound card and speakers. The game controller devices that have been discussed include joystick, gamepad and racing wheel.

Working and maintenance of dot matrix, inkjet and laser printers has been meticulously detailed and presented. Lastly, a reader, after going through this book, will learn about networks and installation of LAN and dial-up network.