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In the Forums... |
Written By: Keith "Farrel" McClellan Posted: February 18, 2000 Windows Setup Once Windows is installed and you boot up into it for the first time, it is going to request that you feed it a bunch of drivers and the like, so make sure you have them on hand. After that's done and you are at your desktop, first check your My Computer folder and make sure that all of your drives and partitions show up. Then go into the Control Panel and use the System applet's Device Manager to make sure your sound card, video card, etc. are installed properly. If some of the parts are only being shown using generic drivers, you will need to change them - which you can do right from within the applet. If there are any conflicts within your computer, they will be marked with a yellow exclamation mark or a red X. You may have some IRQ or memory access conflicts. You should be able to fix them from within the Device Manager - but if you can't, go back through and move one of the offending cards to another slot on the motherboard and see if that helps solve the conflict. If certain parts aren't showing up at all, first go to the Add New Hardware applet and have the computer search for new components - if it doesn't find the part(s) that are missing, turn the computer off and try resetting the pieces of hardware that are causing problems. System Cooling Adequate cooling of your computer is important whether or not you plan on overclocking your system. You should at the very least have some kind of exhaust fan on your computer other than your processor and power supply fans. Beyond that, the extent you go to is up to you - but if you want to overclock, make sure you have some serious cooling - otherwise you could damage your processor. Overclocking If you are considering overclocking your computer, make sure you read up about it in my Overclocking How to guide (Part 1; Part 2). Let me caution you, however, run your computer at its normal speed for the first couple of days after building it to make sure it is completely stable. If it already isn't stable (meaning there is a problem with some piece of hardware) you could just exacerbate the problem, and you would have ruined any warranty you had on the parts as well. If you are really concerned about it, you might consider doing some kind of burn in on your system. Burning in the system is similar to the testing process done on overclocked processors - set a system intensive game into demo loop mode (Unreal works well) and leave it sitting for a while... if it doesn't crash, you're cool. Conclusion Whew... well, there you have it, the mother of the grandmother of the aunt of the daughter of the mother of all computer-building guides. Hope you liked it - and as always, feel free to e-mail me with your questions and comments. |
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