Computer Upgrade Successful
My parts came in from Monarch Computer Systems on Friday, and I couldn’t wait to dig in. As promised, they assembled the motherboard, processor, heatsink and RAM. They also updated to the latest BIOS, which is also very cool of them to do. The shipped box, came with all of the empty boxes, manuals/software, and the motherboard box that contained the fully assembled board. All I needed to do was install my stuff.
The install went smoothly, but upon first boot, I got nothing on the screen. This lit my fuse and put me in a bad mood, because I wanted this thing to be hassle free right out of the box and I just had my first hassle. This being the first time I’ve had to deal with a somewhat powerful CPU that differs from the Socket As in the past, I didn’t realize this motherboard required two powersupply connnections. The typcial ATX connection and an addition 4-pin connection. I had the 4-pin connection tied off and hidden, so it didn’t even occur to me that my problem was that. Once the 4-pin was connected, the machine booted right up and welcomed me to the world of 64-bit. Well, not really. It was the usual boot screens you always see.
Despite my eagerness to blow a whole evening on installing and loading the operating system on this fine machine, I decided to take an hour and get everything wired cleanly and with maximum airflow before moving on. This was an very easy task because the new motherboard had a better layout than the previous. Now everything is tied off and neat. All of the cards, ATI Radeon 7500 and the ATI HDTV Wonder (All two of them), and the hard drives were now installed.
Since this was an all new system, I decided to move my high performance hard drive, a Western Digital Raptor (36GB SATA 10000rpm), to the foreground and make it the boot drive with most of my programs to be running off of it. This was very easy to do in the BIOS settings, so this took all of about a minute.
[got some sleep]
The Windows install went very smoothly, but there is one deviation I had never dealt with before. When installing Windows to a SATA drive, you must hit F6 during the first stages of setup, where it asks about SCSI drivers. I hit F6 and nothing seemed to happen for about 10 seconds, then it went into a driver loading screen and asked me to put in my floppy disk containing my drivers. It loaded the disk and asked which driver to use, which obviously was the XP driver it had as the default. After the driver was loaded, it returned to the all-to-familiar setup screens and went on without a hitch.
For the most part, I am done with this machine, but I do have a few more programs to install. I haven’t put this sucker to the true test of recoding DVD quality video, but that will come soon enough and I will post my findings. One thing that I did notice was that my ATI HDTV Wonder is working much better, but I’m not quite sure why. Perhaps the faster system bus or something is letting it run free. I’m getting channels now I wasn’t able to lockin on with the previous system. That brought me much joy.
Kudos to Monarch Computer Systems for providing great service and good prices.
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