BEFORE YOU BUY THAT NEW PC . . .

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 6, 1993                   TAG: 9301060236
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 10   EDITION: METRO   
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short
BEFORE YOU BUY THAT NEW PC . . .
If Santa left a wad of cash in your stocking with the note "Buy Your Own PC," wait for the January sales - and read a couple of books meanwhile.
The first is "The Streetwise Guide to PCs" (Addison-Wesley, $14.95) by Marty Jerome and Wendy Taylor, editors at PC-Computing.
The book makes the point that you seldom see negative reviews in the PC press because that kennel of PC writers is unlikely to bite the feeding hand of advertising.
Overall, the tone is smart and funny and the advice is good, if offbeat. Here is Reason No. 4 "Not to Spend $3,500 on a Notebook PC:"
"Thirty-five hundred dollars will buy one pair of silk underwear, one case of Gevrey Chambertin (1981), four steel-belted radial tires, six pounds of smoked Norwegian salmon, a Bugs Bunny tattoo, a fax machine, two Adirondack lawn chairs, new running shoes, a decent electric guitar, one-year's subscription to the New York Times, not a bad mountain bike, and a ten-day canoeing expedition (for two) down the Mackenzie River in Canada's Northwest Territories."
(Reason No. 10 is "Almost anything a $3,500 notebook PC can do a $1,200 notebook PC can do.")
The other book is "How Computers Work" (Ziff-Davis, $22.95) by Ron White with illustrations by Timothy Edward Downs. White, executive editor of PC-Computing, has been writing a "How It Works" column in the magazine since 1989, and writes clearly and well of things technical.
But that's not why you buy the book. You buy it for the illustrations, which catch White's technical explanations and freeze them in art.
The book covers the PC itself, all important peripherals and networks.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB