Product Reviews

ISBN 0789728001

Scott Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing PCs is a previous Book of the Month so when I spotted this new title among the month's new releases I was hoping for some welcome help for owners of a stricken laptop computer who couldn't face the likely monster bills from a local repair shop. Assuming that they'd even look at it, that is.

I remember well the first time I dared to take one to bits. A floppy disk had got stuck in the drive of a Toshiba 80286 notebook. It took six minutes to get at the floppy drive internals and free the disk and another six hours to get the computer back together again. The problem is that many laptops are Tardis-like and fit what seems like 10 times the amount of stuff inside than the dimensions allow. Great design, miniaturisation and evolution mean that the modern ones are easier to deal with than that old Toshiba but they're still a sight more intimidating to work on than any desktop machine.

So Mueller's book should be a godsend.

ADVERTISEMENT

Sadly, despite weighing as much as many laptops - and twice as much as my new JVC MiniNote - it's a disappointment. Precious few of the 1,000 pages are devoted to the actual practice of repairing and upgrading. There's stuff about the history of portables, bus specifications, chipset architectures, carry cases (duh!) and endless amounts of nerdy data. How useful would all this be to the average reader with a dead notebook? How useful for a local repair guy trying to get into repairing portables as well as normal machines? It might get you started, but it could leave you with many problems unanswered.

Part of the problem is that so many laptops use manufacturer-specific components and layouts that without the maker's service documentation or access to the maker's own spare parts you can fiddle about with the notebook as much as you like and be no better off.

Along with the book comes a CD with around an hour of video on the same subject. Mueller makes a great show of taking an IBM ThinkPad apart but, unless I missed it, he doesn't show you the important bit - how he got it back together again. As with my Toshiba, I suspect that assembly could be a sight more difficult than disassembly. The video is also highly compressed so the detail is hard to pick out.

The book's not a complete disaster and there is useful information in here, but there's also a lot of what normal mortals might regard as padding. And £37 is a lot to pay for padding. I suggest that prospective readers try to view a copy before parting with their cash and decide if it is what they want.