PC Hardware Buyer's Guide: Choosing the Perfect Components

by Robert Bruce Thompson and Barbara Fritchman Thompson

If you're one of the many who has decided to build your own personal computer system, you know that doing so can be quite a challenge. The information can be overwhelming--and so can the number of choices.It's true, whether you're perusing online sites, or wandering the aisles of your favorite retail store, shopping for PC components is no easy task. Until now. Thanks to PC Hardware Buyer's Guide , the experience of building your own PC system has...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596009380
• ISBN13: 9780596009380
• Release Date: March 2005
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 127 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.1" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Finally, an opinion on hardware

I love this book. Buy it. If you want to put together a PC buy this book. It provides practical advice about hardware options. I really appreciate that. It's why I subscribe to Consumer Reports. So I appreciate that type of advice here. Excellent coverage of all of the elements of the hardware design for a PC. Definitely recommended for anyone looking to build a PC.

An invaluable guide when you go shopping

The condensed knowledge of years of experience buying and selling PC's, its components and assembling them into usable form right in the palm of your hand. You'll get strong opinions, the whys and the whynots. An expert's advice on every component you'll need for your new project or to correct past mistakes on existing PCs. In no time it will save you dozens of times its cover cost, hundreds of hours of lost time and infinite aggravation on easy to avoid or correct mistakes and wrong choices. I highly recommend it and I give it an orchid!

Carry This Guide To Your Computer Store

Bob Thompson has done it again. If you follow PC hardware commentary you will recognize Bob from his books, his web site or Jerry Pournell's website at Byte. This book is another winner! This is a different kind of book from his recent books I've bought: PC Hardware in a Nutshell and How To Build a Perfect PC. Here he and his wife Barbara focus directly into the buy decisions for each component and the tradeoffs to consider. Basically it's a low-end, mid-range, high-end consideration, but tailored to the intended application and, most importantly, it is very specific on brands and models. Not to worry if passing time outdates some of the vendor specifics as he provides you with a web address and password for updates. At a price very little more than a paperback novel this book is a "must have". I wouldn't go to a computer store without it, and it is compact enough to carry in a jacket pocket.

The Essential PC Building Resource

If you look in the PC dictionary, Robert Bruce Thompson and his wife, Barbara Fritchman Thompson, define authority and lucidity when it comes to understanding and building your own PC. This book is a concise yet complete description of components available for building a PC in early 2005. The book is not a manual that teaches you to build a PC, for that look to their larger work, "Building The Perfect PC." This book makes name-brand suggestions regarding component choices one might consider for building any PC from a budget level to an advanced screaming game machine, and details the reasons for the recommendations. It is small enough to carry in your pocket, so if you're going to a computer store for your purchase, bring it along. It even has a two page summary of the book in the back cover to help with your decisions. It also suggests which components might better be purchased locally, and which ones might be purchased via the Net. The practical layout of the book suggests a wealth of experience in answering the questions that invariably crop up in making component choices. The authors have been answering these questions for years, and it shows in the design and presentation of their book. And if you can't answer your questions from the book, their web site is available with a wealth of additional information. And it is always up to date! How can you beat that?

This completes Building the Perfect PC...

Bob and Barbara Thompson ran into a problem with Chapter 2 of "Building The Perfect PC". It was too long. When you're O'Reilly, doing your first four-color printing all the way through, page count rules the purchase price. At well over a hundred pages, that "Choosing and Buying Components" was slashed down to about 40 pages, keeping all the key information, but tightening up on reasoning, justification and options to make terse seem a kind word. But the price that the Thompson's extracted in return was fair: This handy micro-tome, PC Hardware Buyer's Guide. Written, added to, and re-edited on a tight schedule, this Guide is as close to real time as a complete and comprehensive set of hardware recommendations can get. I know because I helped out with the technical reviews. Changes were flowing into the production folks right down to the wire as problems, corporate strategies, and new products altered the real world of PC components. There are primary, secondary and often tertiary recommendations for every mainstream type of component, broken out by cost and applicability to specific system types. For instance, you don't put a high-end Doom 3 capable graphics card (with its correspondingly high fan noise) in a system designed for home theatre or business use, where quiet environments are valued. Anecdotes from building the project systems pop up here and there in the text. Additionally, Bob and Barbara's growing accomodation with assorted Linux distributions has resulted in more testing and selections that are either OS-agnostic or multiple, to cover the expanding range of OS choices that PC builders and users are blessed with lately. The back cover of the book is a fold-out, printed on the inside with a perfect two-page summary of all the important choices and selections made throughout. This allows the book to be most easily used as an in-hand tool for purchasing either the desired component or a highly-rated alternative while in a retail setting like Fry's or Best Buy. One of my duties as a Senior Systems Administrator is to select and build systems for our engineering staff. That's in addition to keeping up with servers, networks, and Microsoft Windows (tm) Patch Day (tm). Although I have the advantage of being able to call Bob or Barbara up when I have a component question, this excellent little PC Hardware Buyer's Guide answers nearly every question I have - and I used this tool while it was in editorial review. Now that I have my hardcopy, it goes onto my desk at work, so that I can get my job done, and go back to doing fun things ... like removing spyware from a computer. Buy this Guide today if you build or plan on building your own PC from components you select and assemble. You'll not be sorry.