No book ever gets published in multiple editions unless its outstanding. And thats certainly the case with Stephen Bigelows book, Troubleshooting, Maintaining & Repairing PCs. Now in its fifth edition, this comprehensive text (more than 1,500 pages plus a CD-ROM) covers just about everything youre ever likely to need to know about your PC.

True to its title the book contains troubleshooting sections that cover memory, monitors, motherboards, parallel ports and USB devices. In addition to helping you resolve nasty or annoying problems, the book can also be put to other uses: theres a chapter devoted to the best techniques for backing up data, while a complementary chapter explains techniques for recovering data thats been lost. From a more positive perspective, you can also tap into the authors extensive experience and knowledge to finetune the different components that make up your PC; for example, a 3D video accelerator card or a modem.

Even if you consider yourself a novice when it comes to computers, dont worry. Bigelow starts off by taking an inside look at a contemporary PC. On this tour, he explains each of the major components including enclosures, monitors, power supplies, motherboards and related parts, video, sound, drive systems, modems and input devices, as well as operating systems.

There are two features of the book that I particularly like. The first is the Further Study section that appears at the end of each chapter. These invariably contain relevant Web addresses from where its easy to pick up extra information. The second feature is the companion CD-ROM that contains more than 120 ready-to-use diagnostic tools and utilities.