Chapter 14. Hardware

A PC contains several pounds of wires, slots, cards, and chips—enough hardware to open a TruValue store. Fortunately, you don’t have to worry about making all of your PC’s preinstalled components work together. In theory, at least, the PC maker did that part for you. (Unless you built the machine yourself, that is; in that case, best of luck.)

But adding new gear to your computer is another story. Hard drives, cameras, printers, scanners, network adapter cards, video cards, keyboards, monitors, game controllers, palmtop synchronization cradles, and other accessories can all make life worth living for the power user. When you introduce a new piece of equipment to the PC, you must hook it up and install its driver, the software that lets a new gadget talk to the rest of the PC.

Fortunately, Microsoft has ...

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