Tidy room, Swish computer

I made it a rule that I would not bring the new computer into this room until I had organised and cleaned it thoroughly. I'm not one of the world's most enthusiastic houseworkers (understatement) so this has taken a little while and a lot of procrastination.

But here we are, today Swish has moved in here.

Never having built a computer from scratch I've been a little hazy about what first...

Cabling! Darn, no matter how long you've been computing I reckon that despite the mound of cables and adapters you accumulate there's bound to be one you do not have. I've bought a KVM switch so I can run both computers from one setup. I forgot I have a USB mouse... need a USB to PS/2 connector...

Dug out a bit of LAN cabling but couldn't set up a connection... duh... look at the device manager and see that nothing's properly installed as yet.

Installed the graphics drivers while I had a look at the CD that came with the motherboard. Nice, there's a lot of drivers there, read the readmes and started. Seems to have gone smoothly.

Now what?

Yup, my display adapter now correctly says GeForce 8800 thank goodness... nothing like the misery of buying a nifty graphics card only to find it labelled 'Standard VGA adapter'.

The LAN is now working - Generic Marvell Yukon Chipset based Ethernet controller. Well whaddya know!

Uh oh, 21 days left to activate, ok, good job I got the LAN going then, there that's done.

I chose the option not to install the audio. It told me to. I went to the Microsoft download center as instructed in the readme but as I suspected, service Pack 2 has already adressed whatever issue there was. The audio is still disabled so ran the installation of the Realtek HD audio river R1.58.

More on things like Scratch Disks

So another issue to bear in mind is the need for a lot of scratch disk space and that like the page file, it will benefit from frequent defragmenting.

Just collecting another set of links that I might need to refer back to here'

Scratch disk

Scratch disk full

Some rosity threads

PS and scratch disk

In PS forum

another

Computer built

Well the computer is all put together, Windows XP Pro is installed and I partitioned one of the hard drives. I paused before doing the other one because I thought perhaps I should have a plan for how I use the space.

Bleugh, that's where it gets confusing, different people with different advice.

I could set up a partition just for the page file. But how big does the page file need to be on this system? I don't know in advance as I've not used it for anything yet.

Here's some things to think about

Microsoft page on XP 64bit

Roy Longbottom's page on remapping the bios to use more memory.

Then a page on optimising virtual memory that is written pre XP so I'm not sure how relevent it is to a 64 bit OS.

A Renderosity thread on fiddling with memory settings in the ini file

Ordered at last

Yay, after a morning's work I have put in the complete orders. I had supply problems where some of the bits went out of stock, especially the motherboard... rather a crucial item!

I hope I got all the right bits, they all fit together and mke a complete computer. At the moment it's a little like one of those jigsaws you do blind but with millions of bits and not knowing which ones will belong to your jigsaw and which won't.

My husband is going to be away on Sunday so it would be great if we could get it running before he goes.

My three suppliers ended up being Aria (used them before and they're very good), Komplett (motherboard and RAM only) and Amazon for the PSU.