Maintenance

     Have you considered upgrading your current system? Ever wonder how to upgrade it? Do you have the skill and patience necessary to do the work yourself? Should you pay someone else to do it? Should you dump it altogether for a new one? Are these and other questions running through your mind? If so, read on!

     Galen Grimes has written the 10 Minute Guide to PC Upgrades to offer valuable insight and help to assist his readers to upgrade their own PC's. This compact 200-page ! guide offers good detail about the art & science of upgrading PC's. Actual hands-on photographs demonstrate how to install CPU's, memory chips, sound cards, modems, SCSI cards, hard drives, internal diskette and tape drives, Zip drives, and a host of peripherals. Emphasis is placed upon installing device cables correctly. Beyond simple installation instructions the author offers brief but helpful information about each device, including how they work and how to select the right ones to meet your computing needs!

     This handy book is easy to read and follow. This book would make a great textbook for a beginner's computer class. It would also make an excellent companion to someone's first computer system! Readers can begin at the front of the book (recommended), or simply thumb through the rest of the book to find the specific instructions they need.

     Before spending big bucks to buy a new computer system consider upgrading your current one. You may be a bit surpr! ised at the savings of money and improved performance your ! current system could provide. Go for it!

She was an intellectual who lived in a time when women were severely constrained by domestic drudgery. Catherine Beecher strived to ennoble women's traditional role through education:

"It is the aim of this volume to elevate both the honor and the remuneration of all employments that sustain the many difficult and varied duties of the family state, and thus to render each department of woman's profession as much desired and respected as are the most honored professions of men."

There is a great deal of moralizing in this book, about lifestyle, Christian charity, care of children and servants, and so forth. In this, Catharine Beecher was a product of her century. Yet some of the observations are surprisingly astute, even for today's readers. For instance, there is a humorous passage about cooking with butter that will have you smiling about rancid butter in every dish. In so many ways, the modern homemaker has less to worry about. We can purchase conveniences that were undreamt of 130 years ago.

This is a self-consciously "American" perspective on keeping a middle class house. Yet the French are looked to as having perfected cooking and many other things, and this sort of repetitious praise can grate on the American reader. Beecher was addressing the American woman during the Civil War and post-Abolition time period, during a great influx of European immigrants and when the population was actively expanding westward. She had it in mind to influence the young woman of a certain generation, and in many ways, her ideas were both more advanced and more orderly than what had gone before.

This book is a *must read* for students of Women's History as it pertains to women in the home. If you are interested in the 19th century lifestyle, you will find many domestic details here.

This easy-to-read book starts with the very basics of gardening - the site, the soil and the tools a new gardener will need and then guides the reader in developing gardens for a wide range of sites. He explains how to design a garden, choose annuals and perennials for the site and each season, and then how to maintain that garden through the year. There are good source lists and a useful reference section.

The writer has a direct approach that is readable and useful for the novice gardener. The book is published by Rodale - a long-established and reliable publisher of gardening books.