Building the Perfect PC

Acknowledgments

This book was conceived one day in late 2003, when Robert received a phone call from Mark Brokering, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for O’Reilly. Mark had decided to build a new PC rather than buy one, and he’d picked up a copy of our book, PC Hardware in a Nutshell.

Mark had lots of good questions about which components to choose and, later on, questions about assembling his new system. At some point during the back-and-forth of emails and phone calls, Mark commented, “You know, we really need to do a book about building a PC.” And so this book was born.

The working title was Build Your Own Computer. None of us thought that was a great title, but no one could come up with a better one. Then one day Tim O’Reilly weighed in: “Why don’t we call it Building the Perfect PC?” Duh. It always seems so obvious after the fact.

In addition to Mark, Tim, and the O’Reilly production staff, who are listed individually in the colophon, we want to thank our technical reviewers: Ron Morse, who’s been building PCs for more than 20 years, and Jim Cooley, who’s built and repaired computers from San Francisco to Athens (Ohio), with the occasional stop in Bangalore. Both did yeoman duty in finding mistakes we made and in making numerous useful suggestions, all of which helped make this a better book.

We also want to thank our contacts at the hardware companies, who provided technical help, evaluation units, and other assistance. There are far too many to list individually, but they ...