Building the Perfect PC, Third Edition

Foreword to the Third Edition

A lot has changed in the computer world since the last edition of this book, and even more since its first edition. Computers have become more powerful: when I wrote the foreword for the first edition, I had over 20 networked desktop computers, far more than I needed, but networking was complex and I needed a full network so that I could understand networking problems. Today, either of the two desktops I use as main machines have more computing power and disk storage than did all my computers put together a few years ago—and if I have a sudden need for a lot more storage or computing power, I have access to “cloud computing” that can supply far more.

There have been other changes since the last edition of Building the Perfect PC. Quad- and even hex-core processors (and the chipsets and CPU sockets to support them) have not only become commonplace, but pretty well required. Tiny Mini-ITX systems, formerly niche products, are mainstream. CRT monitors—bottles—have pretty well vanished, replaced by flat-panel LCD displays, some as large as TV sets used to be. Audio and video built in to the motherboard are now good enough for a lot more than they used to be, while some external video cards now do as much computing as the best CPUs did. Audio processing has changed dramatically. Memory has gone through transmogrifications from DDR to DDR2 (now giving way to DDR3). Solid-state drives are available for both laptops and desktops.

If you’re contemplating ...