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.