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Complete Idiots Guide to Fixing Your #$%@ PC by Michael Miller

ISBN: 0 7897 2092 2       Publisher: Que       Pages: 398pp       Price: £15.99

Categories:   internals and hardware

Reviewed by Francis Glassborow in C Vu 12-3 (May 2000)

It will be expensive and probably too late to call in the expert after you have messed up.

Having issued the mandatory warnings, if you really want to acquire skills in maintaining your own computer(s) this book is a fair place to start. I would suggest that you first read the whole book and try to understand as much as you can. If you still want to go ahead and learn machine maintenance read it again slowly. Now go and back up everything and put aside some money for when you screw up.

Now you are on your own and the book will help you up to a point.

Let me give you an example. In the chapter on what to do if your mouse stops working it tells you to 'click' on a button. That will be more than a little difficult given the problem you are trying to fix.

By the way this is not a book about upgrading so do not expect much help with fitting something such as a new graphics card.

In summary, this is not a bad book to have if you confine yourself to simple problems, and pass the more complicated ones to an expert. Unfortunately, the biggest problem is to distinguish simple problems from others and here the book gives you little guidance.