Oops (Updated)

I got my parts, right on schedule.  It was kind of cool, being able to see where it was via the online tracking, and knowing it had arrived in the FedEx facility right here in Middleboro in the wee hours, then been loaded onto a truck at 6-odd AM to come to me.

I have a DVD-R drive, a DVD-RW (burner) drive, and a 200 GB IDE hard drive—actually, two of them if I want to go crazy—to go in the machine.

I looked at the board and thought it was weird there were only two connectors where the two IDE and one floppy connectors would normally be.  At first I thought maybe it was “legacy free” and lacked floppy capacity.  No.  You get four SATA (serial ATA) connectors, so why on earth would you need more than two IDE drives?

Doh!

I guess the thing either has to wait for me to get a SATA drive, or it can only have one DVD drive.  Certainly once I’ve installed Vista onto the IDE drive, I will be stuck.  Crazy.

On a more positive note, the CPU heat sink and fan unit is impressive.  I wasn’t expecting something so massive and downright cool looking.

Update:

The computer is built, just waiting to be tested with a bootable CD and/or to have an OS installed.  Ran into other stuff along the way.

First, I was at first glance impressed at the apparent extensive, colorful nature of the documentation in the motherboard box.

It sucks.

Pure pictorials don’t strike me as ideal in the first place, but it helps for them to be accurate and easy to follow.  One set of pictures did the equivalent of this text:

This is explaining how to do things in a particular order, so you should
.alarmed or confused be to not as so carefully along follow

This was my first experience with Intel’s temper tantrum regarding ease with which CPU pins are damaged, in which they made the motherboard manufacturers change everything in order to shed the risk.  That was interesting.

Anyway, who thinks to check whether a motherboard comes with PS/2 ports for keyboard and mouse?  Not me!  My first realization of that came when I went to install the backplate that came with the motherboard and saw no holes for keyboard and mouse.  Oops.

I can rustle up a PS/2 mouse, but I am 99% sure I lack a USB keyboard without going to the office or store.  Thus I can’t even test it with a boot disk yet.  Speaking of boot disks, I didn’t put in a floppy drive.  I might later, but it shouldn’t be needed.

As for the drive issue, I can get a 500 GB Seagate SATA drive with 16 MB cache for $96, and the grace period on activating Vista would mean I could install and play with Vista, beat on it hard, not activate, then switch to the SATA drive, wipe the IDE, install Vista permanently, and activate it then.  That gives me extra “training,” too.  I’ll probably do that.

Posted by on 07/21 at 02:38 PM

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