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The IRQ Book, by Kate Chase, is an inexpensive and highly readable power-user volume. It focuses on administration of interrupt assignments under Windows 95/98 and, to a lesser extent, NT 4.0. After that topic peters out about halfway through, the book goes on to various other Wintel hardware maintenance issues, such as troubleshooting and upgrading hardware and introducing the Windows Registry.
Administering Wintel hardware with its five or six or seven I/O bus architectures and its simpering graphical user interface is a task that is rapidly approaching the complexity of administering an S/390 mainframe. The IRQ Book is breadth first, as might be expected, but there's real content here, enough that the author is effectively expressing a flattering confidence in the reader's degree of comfort with detail.
Having some nontrivial experience in this field, I enjoyed The IRQ Book's presentation. Any number of techniques by which the novice may destroy system integrity are outlined frankly and the causes of the disaster explained down to the BIOS where necessary. It is bold to attempt to provide the tyro with a functional grasp of the single most sensitive potential failure point of the Wintel run time.
The incidental chapter on PC cooling and power is an inspired addition to a self-help book. Read it first, and if you didn't know what you read in this chapter you've already gotten your money's worth. The CD-ROM accompanying The IRQ Book contains two pieces of software.
The first is a "freeware" (but not Free Software or Open Source) registry key backup program offered by Moon Software of Estonia. The other is Peter Gebhardt's "Dr. Hardware" program, the README of which spoke so eloquently of possible system hangs and blue screens of death that I would never dream of testing it on my production Windows NT machine. I'd respectfully suggest that next time McGraw-Hill consider including source code with such utilities if they expect them to be taken seriously, or taken at all. To their credit, the editors did not enable the CD-ROM with Autoplay.
I'm sending The IRQ Book to my father, who is struggling with an SCSI adapter and a USB interface on the motherboard, both of which are on the same IRQ. I've diagnosed this over the phone several times; but Dad, having bought his first personal computer while in his mid-seventies and becoming a power user in two years, doesn't feel grounded enough in theory to delve to that level. The IRQ Book may serve to dispel somewhat his diffidence. (But I wouldn't dream sending him that CD-ROM.)
-- Jack Woehr
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Explanation of ERCB rating scale: No stars = unacceptable, 1 Star = marginal, 2 Stars = average, 3 Stars = above average, 4 Stars = exceptional.