Audience
This book is intended for anyone who buys, builds, upgrades, or
repairs PCs in a corporate, small-business, or home setting. If you
want to buy a PC, this book tells you what to look forand what
to look out for. If you want to build a PC, this book explains,
component by component, the key parts of a PC, describes the
important characteristics of each, provides buying guidelines,
recommends specific products (by brand name and model), and takes you
step by step through building the PC. If you have an older PC, this
book tells you what you need to know to upgrade itif it makes
sense to do soas well as when it makes more sense simply to
retire it to less-demanding duties. Finally, if your PC breaks, this
book tells you what you need to know to troubleshoot the problem and
then choose and install replacement parts.This book focuses on PC hardware running Windows 9X and Windows
2000/XP, which among them power the vast majority of PCs. For the
first time, this edition includes limited coverage of Linux-related
hardware issues. The coverage is limited not because we think Linux
deserves or needs less complete coverage than Windows, but because
we're still Linux newbies. Some of what
we've written about Linux issues will no doubt be
obvious to experienced Linux users, but may be helpful to those who,
like us, are just starting to migrate to Linux. We use eight primary
systemsdesktops, notebooks, and servers. Three of those are
now running Linux exclusively. We expect that proportion to be
reversed by the time we finish the next edition of this book.