So everything is put together, now what?

[hatchmar]

Yea- I never built before. So I got everything together and I powered up into BIOS to make sure everything came on and to change the settings that I know about. so now what? Here is where all of the online guides get really vauge. they just assume that we *****s know exactly what to do next. I have Win XP w/SE disk. do I just shove it in and hope for the best? I know there is something that I have to do with drivers for my SATA HD (in my Sig.) but how and what is a mystery. when i bought the HD from newegg, that is all i got... the HD and Bubblewrap, nothing else. I have seen mention about a bootable floppy disk but do i need that if i have XP CD? It will stink if i do because the only computer I have access to is a crappy windows ME machine and I dont think it has a floppy drive.

 

[Blakhart]

Hi
If you have the sata drive connected to a mobo sata connector, you need not install any other drivers than the complete mobo driver after you've installed xp. Xp will boot and load fine, as the 865/875 chipset treats sata drive as standard pata ide, no booting or recognition probs at all. Keep in mind that sata is ide as well. Just paralell vs serial.

Anyway, the way I do an os install is first go into bios and disable everything I will never use, parport, comms ports, onboard sound, etc. Then boot from the xp cd and load xp, then the mobo drivers, update xp all you want online, when done load dx9c or whatever dx ver you want to run, next install vid card driver, sound, all the other system drivers you need, then finaly apps like games and av/spyware. Update all and you're done. Go play.

:chef:

 

[hatchmar]

Thank you very very very much!

 

[hatchmar]

sweet, Im replying on my home made baby! its only a soc 478 but what a difference between this and my old one !

 

[Merc14]

Congrats on getting it up and running. What was the problem earlier?

 

[hatchmar]

I had several little problems (couple of other threads) but I was at a point where I had everything ready according to all of the manuals, but they just kind of stopped explaining what to do next. My 1st powerup was a complete failure, didnt do anything at all... no fans no nothing. I found that I had a panel connector in backwards. the labeling was aweful and both wires were black so I had no idea which way they went. no there are just little odds and ends to figure out- like, why is there a connector for the CPU fan coming from the case display panel? I tried hooking the CPU fan there but I got the fan error at bootup. I was assuming that it was there to control the temp of the CPU. im suri ill run into other stuff

 

[Blakhart]

Hi
Would you have learned anything if it all went perfectly the first time?
That will happen in the future, but it'll be boring...

 

[hatchmar]

absolutely not and I am glad I went through all of this because I plan on never buying a prebuilt computer ever again!

 

[sllewe]

Just giving you a heads up

Your sig says P4 2.4GB CPU lol i think it should say GHz. the terms get quite confusing :haha:

 

[hatchmar]

yea- and when i was writing the sig, I was using my PPC and its a pain just to see what im typing. lol