The average PC user perceives a personal computer as a complex, delicate, often belligerent creature hiding inside a little gray box, a box that works much like the Wizard in Wizard of Oz… a wizened being scurrying around madly behind a red curtain to make the smoke puff and the mirrors twirl. This perception is wrong, but it's not your fault! The blame lies squarely on the shoulders (and pointy heads) of the PC industry's big-wigs, pundits, and chest-pounders. These folks have gone out of their way to litter the PC arena with jargon, obtuse explanations, and a perverse fascination with features that have nothing to do with the PC being your tool and serving your will. Naturally, we fall into the opposite camp; we fervently believe you are the boss and the PC is your tool. The goal of this book is to demystify the little gray box, give you the information you need to make it serve you better, and to have fun along the way.

Part I, "Introduction," explains precisely what steps to take before you touch anything. It doesn't make sense to upgrade a component without knowing what your system was like before the upgrade, so we provide a soup-to-nuts inventory form (downloadable in Excel format or hard copy from Appendix D). As we walk you through the form you learn about the various components of your PC. We use plain English to describe the different types of peripheral buses so you'll know which bus to use for which component, and we offer tips on buying hardware online. Part I concludes with a step-by-step checklist for performing an upgrade on any component. Subsequent chapters drill further down on this checklist as it applies to each specific component in a modern PC.

Part II, "The Core Upgrades," is the meat and potatoes part of the meal. Here we cover upgrading the BIOS, system memory, motherboard, microprocessor, hard disk, Internet connections, and how to connect PCs into a network.

Part III, "Upgrades to Consider," covers the two Us. These two areas are often considered optional or even unnecessary, but we disagree vehemently. For a few dollars more, adding an interruptible power supply (UPS) increases your peace of mind regarding power fluctuations and outages that can easily-and permanently-wreck your system. We feel that a UPS-properly matched to its constituent hardware-is a mandatory component for any modern system. The second member of the U family is USB, an acronym for Universal Serial Bus. This medium-speed peripheral bus primarily offers ease of use with a simple cable/port design, automatic re-configuration upon connection or disconnection of any device, and no use of sparse IRQs. USB has been built in to most systems for the last several years and you should be taking advantage of it.

Part IV, "Upgrading Peripherals," sets out to soothe your eyeballs and appease your ears… with a new video setup, printer, and sound setup, that is. How many hours per day do you sit staring at your monitor; eight hours, ten hours, or more? You're definitely a candidate for a sharper, flicker-less monitor with more screen real estate, conformity to the latest energy safety specifications, and support for power management in all its incarnations. Oh, and a light-speed graphics card to drive it. If your printer is more than a few years old you can buy a new one with features that make the current one seem like a deadbeat, and for about half the price of the original! And then there's your sound setup. If you want to listen to streaming audio on a speakers-sound card combo that barely competes with the radio in a 1975 Pinto, fine by us. But you can get near-audiophile quality today for prices that get the attention of even the most cost-conscious PC lover.

Part V, "Adding the Extras," covers the remaining devices you might choose to add or upgrade: CD-R/CD-RW drive, DVD drive, other removable media drive, tape drive, and scanner.

Part VI, "Upgrading Software," tackles operating system and application upgrades. We also address how to partition a hard disk so you can run multiple operating systems on the same PC, a process called multi-booting. This gives you the ability to turn one PC into two or three PCs, each with its own operating environment. This is an ideal way to safely beta test software without putting your production partition at risk, and it's a cost-effective way to meet client project requirements without investing in multiple PCs. Multi-booting is also useful for cloning a partition, meaning, take a snapshot of a partition and set it aside in case you need to roll back in the event of a problem with your production partition.

Part VII, "Solving Problems," gives you the strategies and tools you need to efficiently solve software and hardware problems. Ranging from a discussion of common problems and how to fix them, step by step, to Registry restoration tricks. Plus, we cover an area that other hardware books ignore: getting good technical support. Over our collective three decades of computer consulting experience, we've placed literally thousands of calls to technical support engineers. We have refined the checklist on how to handle these calls, right down to the gnat's eyebrow, and present it for your use in this section of the book. By using our calling techniques, you'll get better answers and solve your problem much faster. Try it, you'll like it.

We hope you find this book a good resource for saving your valuable time, increasing your PC's work capabilities and its fun factor, and reducing the upgrade stress factor. We wrote this book for you, and look forward to hearing from you.

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