Amazon.com Review
Upgrading and Maintaining Your PC is a very interesting book that serves as a do-it-yourself guide to adding and altering components in your PC. It delivers helpful tables of necessary data such as pin wiring diagrams for various PC cables, and also provides an overview of how the machine works and how to make the right upgrade decisions. This is a hefty volume with a meaty CD-ROM companion, and one very nice feature is that it covers a number of operating systems: Windows 3.1, Windows for Workgroups, Window NT, Windows 95, and OS/2 Warp. It also delivers good coverage of most modern Intel, AMD and Cyrix microprocessors, as well as of various BIOS installations.

The upgrade instructions have a lot of detail, and are illustrated with good-quality black-and-white photographs. A chapter troubleshooting a number of common PC hardware problems is also complete, but these troubleshooting tips are limited to hardware-related issues rather than the kinds of problems that arise from damaged system registries and other major operating system software glitches. The book includes a detailed glossary, a comprehensive index, tables of hard-drive parameters and pin diagrams, and even a timeline of PC hardware developments from 1971 to the present. If you want help upgrading your PC to help stave off obsolescence, or if you want to know in more detail about the inner workings of your PC hardware, Upgrading and Maintaining Your PC is worth owning.