the thread is glad to have someone such as yourself who has ventured into the build-your-own waters and returned to tell us about it! <g3>
As it turned out, Mark, the waters weren't very stormy. Picking out and ordering the parts was far more time consuming than physically building the system. I took my time and followed this very detailed system building guide which took me through the process step by step. I highly recommend it. pcmech.com
There were a few bumps along the way. I learned that setting the jumper on the hard drive as master is a mistake if you only have one drive. All the guides I looked at said the single drive only setting worked the same as master, so I set it as master so I wouldn't have to change it if I added another drive. It took me a while to figure out why sometimes the system found the drive and other times not. I changed cables, tried the other ide connection on the motherboard, and generally pulled my hair out thinking I had a bad drive or bad ide port or bad power cable. (The Western Digital runs so quietly you can hardly tell it's powered up.) The other time consuming problem was putting the system on my little three computer network. Very frustrating, because I was sure everything was set correctly, and I already had a functioning two computer network. BTW the putergeek network site mentioned here on the thread was a big help in troubleshooting the network settings, and my settings are better now than before. Turned out it was a flaky on again off again network card, and after replacing it all was well.
So far I'm running Windows 98. I also have the Windows XP beta and plan to install it on another partition. But I wanted to make sure all is running well with a known relatively stable os before I ventured into uncharted waters. Do you have any favorite sources that guide one through a dual operating setup?
Oh, another big help was this bios optimization guide. rojakpot.com There are lots of bios settings to choose from and the documentation that comes with the motherboard is pretty sketchy.
Overall it was a great learning experience, and I'm left with a nice sense of accomplishment, and a nice computer I'm not afraid to tinker with.
Esteban |
