Customer Reviews

PC Hardware Buyer's Guide: Choosing the Perfect Components

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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!

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?

Upon initial publication, was likely an excellent supplement to the authors' publication "Building the Perfect PC". Information is now out of date regarding many computer components. Sorry that I wasted my money on this.

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.

PC Hardware Buyer's Guide Choosing the Perfect Components, could be considered a Directors Cut and Refresh of it's parent book, Building the Perfect PC all rolled into one.

As the author explains in the book's opening, Building the Perfect PC had to have it's "choosing components" chapter slimmed down in page count, and as you'd expect slowly starts to go out of date.

This book expands that chapter back to it's original girth, and refreshes the choices to take account of the changes in the market since the first book.

This has lead to a pocket book, that's a great addition, and as suggested by the author easy enough to take with you to the shops.

This book should be purchase by anyone who has Building the Perfect PC and reads and uses it. It should also be considered as a standalone guide to choosing the best components, because when you're standing in a computer store, pondering your next harddrive choice, it'll certainly come in handy.

As you'd expect it's written in a clear, helpful and friendly manner. The backpage also folds out to expose a single A4 size summary of the components discussed in the book, so you can quickly see what the top LCD screen choices were.

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.

PC Hardware Buyer's Guide is written by the authors of Building the Perfect PC. It provides more up-to-date recommendations on available hardware. The fold-out guide that is part of the back cover is a very useful quick reference. It is a nice companion to Building the Perfect PC.

I first found out about these authors from Jerry Pournelle, a columnist for Byte magazine. I immediately bought their then-current book "PC Hardware in a Nutshell." That book was immensely helpful to me when building my own PC, and this book follows in the same vein.

It contains excellent info about every major component of a PC including the case, power supply, processor, heatsink, CPU fan, motherboard, memory, floppy, hard drive, CD/DVD drive, video card, sound card, speakers, keyboard, mouse, network adapter and modem.

The authors give great trade-off info on how to choose each component based on the type of system you want to build, generally economy, business, mainstream, performance or gaming. The book is full of recommendations on what brand and model to buy for each component for each type of system. It has great little tips about what to look for, what to avoid, and most importantly, decision criteria so you know how to modify their recommendations for your needs.

The authors also give advice on where to buy your components along with tips on how to pick a good vendor, whether it be online, mail order or retail.

This is an excellent book for anyone wanting to build a computer for the first time or the 100th time. I have a lot experience with programming and building computers, and I learned quite a bit from it. As Mr. Pournelle would say, Highly Recommended.

This little book is a sort of companion/update for Building the Perfect PC, also by the Thompsons, from O'Rielly. Given the hothouse speed with which PC components evolve, such a volume is probably a necessity. The authors include a number of URLs to their own websites as well as various manufacturers so you can research the most up-to-date information.

Who should buy this book? Anyone, and I do mean anyone who is thnking about building a PC for just about any purpose. Even if you are fairly conversant with the field, you'll find useful information in this slim quick reference.

I have always considered myself relatiavely knowledgeable about mainstream PC hardware. I've been involved in the PC world even before it was the PC world, back in the days of Altairs and punched paper tape and TTY terminals. I sold one of the first TRS-80 Model I's ever seen in the Metro Detroit area. I learned about 8" floppy drives, 5.25" floppy drives, Bernoulli drives, hard drives (5 Megabyte was huge back then), bus speeds, disk operating systems, LPTs, serial ports, video adapters (Hercules, CGA, EGA, VGA,etc.), RAM, ROM, CPUs (4004s, 8008, 8080s, 8086s, V20s, V30, 68000s, and on and on and on) and thought I'd kind up kept up over the years. HA!

In the first five minutes with the Thompson's little quick reference book I learned that I don't know squat about the modern PC! Even if you are a lot more current than I was, you probably need this book to avoid making at least one costly mistake in the next (or first) PC you build.

The Thompsons have given the whole process of building a PC a great deal of thought, particularly in regards to just what level of component quality/performance you need in a number of generic classifications.

Even if you are not thinking about buiding a PC from scratch, but just want to know aobut upgrading your current system, this is an invaluable tool for deciding what you can reasonably do given what you currently have to work with.

The writing is clear and easy to follow without being "dumbed down." A fold-out backcover has a detailed summary chart of the authors' recommendations.