The Pride and Pitfalls of Today s Integrated PC

The Pride and Pitfalls of Today’s Integrated PC

Now that you have an idea of the interconnectedness of hardware, software, and the operating system within your PC, you should be able to appreciate two main points.

First, integration throughout the PC makes your keyboard-based lives easier because you don’t have to know as much about installing hardware, or applications, or configuring your systems:

• You can install a printer once and have it available immediately to dozens of applications you have installed that allow you to print.

• You can plug in a digital camera and immediately use your photos in a document you’re creating in Microsoft Word, a web page you’re designing in FrontPage or DreamWeaver, or in an Internet chat program where you can share your pictures with others.

• You can upgrade your web browser and find that every time you click a link to automatically load your web browser, the new link loads and picks up the preferences and favorite sites listing from your old one.

• As you learned in the BIOS section, you can even take a new hard drive right out of the box and physically install it to your PC, and Windows XP will take care of the rest, saving you many steps of normal drive preparation.

But the second major point is that these interrelationships and conveniences may make it more difficult when you have to analyze and troubleshoot your system to turn a disaster into a recovery.

Think back for a moment about the video system discussed earlier. You don’t have just one component responsible for providing your display but four. If your system takes some type of hit that results in serious display problems, how do you know which of these four components is the guilty party? Did lightning zap the monitor or somehow affect the video adapter installed within the PC? Did the fact that you used System Restore (the feature in Windows Millennium and later that allows you to return your system back to a “safe” point before a problem developed) after the incident mean that your video device driver was changed back to an older version that causes problems with your display? Or is there something amiss with Windows itself that also affects your PC picture?

A good troubleshooter, as you’ll learn in Chapter 7, isn’t someone who necessarily knows everything. Instead, it’s someone who takes into account all these possibilities and then examines them systematically starting with the most likely suspect and working down the list of possibilities until he or she finds the problem and its solution.

This will be your challenge as you read through this book and beyond when you encounter a situation that requires serious troubleshooting and recovery. If you’re lucky enough to avoid all disasters (and the next few chapters should help you toward that end), you’ll at least come away with a lot of new information and great new sleuthing skills.

But before we jump ahead, let me offer one more example of how integration can raise the level of complication.

Today’s Integrated Motherboards

All motherboards are integrated, meaning they have more than one chipset and component directly installed in them, working together. In this case, however, an integrated motherboard is one that incorporates into its design the features and functions of one or more other components such as a video adapter, sound adapter, modem, or network card, usually available as separate cards installed to ports or connectors on the motherboard.

This kind of integration isn’t new. It was done before, as recently as the early 1990s, to try to make PCs more affordable for the masses at a time when a very good desktop system started at near $3,000. Mobile computers such as laptops often use integrated motherboards, then and now. But as the 1990s progressed, integrated motherboards were largely abandoned for “good” desktop PCs because integrated components such as video and audio were not always of the same quality as those components that required a separate, installed adapter. Now, the more comfortable users become with their PCs and the more demands they place on their PCs, the more likely it is that they’ll want to customize their PC components.

However, the concept of integration has been embraced again as a means of lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO), a figure used by businesses to describe the actual cost of owning a computer over time. PC manufacturers and resellers, most working with razor-thin profit margins, pay less to buy these integrated boards. Now, you’re seeing them on all types of systems rather than just on budget PCs.

On the one hand, such integration certainly lowers the price of installing separate adapters (and at least in theory, frees up some bus slots for installing other adapter-style devices). But it’s a situation where you put many of your PC hardware eggs into one basket. An electrical surge to the motherboard, for example, wipes out not just the motherboard but everything directly mounted in it such as integrated video or networking adapters. This happens with adapters installed to non-integrated motherboards, too, but it’s statistically less likely to fry everything else outside of a catastrophic motherboard event.

Also, if one of the integrated components on an integrated motherboard fails or is damaged, you may have to replace the motherboard, even if other integrated components work fine. Finally, some integrated motherboards allow you to install a physical adapter and disable the onboard (meaning integrated into the motherboard) component, while others do not. Using video as an example, if your video chipset integrated into the motherboard dies or seriously distorts your display, you may not be able to install a separate video card adapter to get past this. You’re stuck with replacing the motherboard.

Replacing the motherboard isn’t the end of the world. But in the best scenario, even with good electronics or computer shops nearby, the likelihood is slim that you can replace the motherboard in less than a day or two. A colleague who does this type of work tells me that even with overnight delivery of parts, a PC stays at his shop for an average of four days for a motherboard replacement. That’s something to think about as you move into preparing a disaster plan in Chapter 5, “Drafting Your Disaster Recovery Plan,” especially if you depend on your PC for your livelihood.

When you reach Chapter 6, “Transforming Yourself into a Smart Troubleshooter: Detecting, Analyzing, and Diagnosing,” you’ll get into the real meat of smart troubleshooting, using this chapter as your primer on the parts of a PC.

However, I would be remiss if I didn’t describe the many ways you can protect your PC from the types of damage that can befall it from man-made and human errors and from the external influences you and your PC may work under. Move on to Chapter 3 to learn more.