Learning the Nuts and Bolts of Electronics

Clueless about that mysterious doohickey you received this holiday? Turn to www.tomshardware.com.

Chances are, if it has a semiconductor, Tom Pabst and his crew have turned it inside out, examined the nuts and bolts, and figured out what makes it tick.

In addition to thorough reviews written in plain English, the site contains step-by-step instructions on installing and using hundreds of PC peripherals and consumer electronics--from joysticks to memory cards.

Pabst, who trained as a medical doctor in his native Germany, started his site in 1996 as a hobby. The site now attracts 1.7 million unique visits a month from seasoned techies and first-time buyers.

Pabst himself has become a bit of a geek’s celebrity after he took on Intel last year, forcing the chip maker to temporarily stop shipping its 1.13 gigahertz Pentium III after he wrote that it was “faulty” and “unreliable.”

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Alex Pham