If You're Into PC Hardware, This Is the Chapter Where You'll Have a Lot of Fun, And
chapter 1 INSTALLING HARDWARE f you’re into PC hardware, this is the chapter where you’ll have a lot of fun, and pos- Isibly learn something. PC hardware has dramatically improved over the past five years. PCs offer better speed, better prices, better compatibility, and incredibly better hardware quality than ever. Some strange and potentially crippling holdovers persist from the very first days of the PC platform, the most notable of which is interrupts. Interrupts are discussed in much more detail below. Despite some nagging problems, PCs are unquestionably faster and cheaper. This chapter discusses how you can get more out of your Windows 98 system. A huge commodity parts market flourishes around the PC platform. Every comput- er store in your area sells add-on parts for your machine—video cards, sound cards, net- work cards, new hard disks, and so on. Buying new parts is a great way to extend the life of your machine. The process can get complicated. This chapter’s main mission is to help you understand and avoid the many gotchas involved in upgrading and general- ly working with your PC’s hardware. Here’s the absolute, paramount fact of this whole chapter: N Windows 98 computers rely on a specific PC feature called hardware interrupts (called IRQs, for short). N Every PC computer built in the past ten years—Windows PCs, MS-DOS PCs, you name it—uses 16 hard-wired interrupt lines that are built into the computer’s hard- ware. (The original IBM PC and XT machines had just 8 interrupts.) 1 2 CHAPTER 1 • INSTALLING HARDWARE All the individual devices in your PC, such as the keyboard, serial ports, modem, video card, networking card, printer port, sound card, game/joystick port, and disk con- troller, each occupy one of those 16 precious interrupts.
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