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Originally Posted by IC3
See this's the thing, I think i'm gonna be able to hook everything up in the case no problem...
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The hardest part, in my opinion. If you can seat everything and get it going where it needs to go, then, you sir, are sitting pretty indeed.
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I don't know all the shit i gotta do to the system before installing XP pro nor do i know how.
I honestly didn't know that i had to fuck with the bios and set it up and all that. I figured i would just leave it as it is....
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In my experience a lot of the new motherboards will take care of it themselves. I know on the last motherboard I installed a lot of the settings defaulted to 'auto' meaning that I didn't have to change anything unless I wanted to tweak it a bit.
The Windows installer works fine for partioning a new hard drive. I've done it both ways (partioned and not) and there doesn't seem to be any discernable difference. I tend to err on the side of safety so, I would agree with
soccerchamp in his reasoning for partioning the drive. Over the years, I've had several Windows installations crap out on me for various reasons (some self-inflicted...
), but by keeping my important stuff on a seperate partition I've always been able to get everything back to normal pretty fast. Just be sure you don't short change the Windows partition and make it too small. With a 200GB hard drive you have plenty of space to play with.
If you were desperate for space, I'd say add the Compaq hard drive, but with a brand new 200GB drive I really don't see any reason to put in your new system.
No, you don't need a DOS boot disk or even a floppy drive if you don't want it. If the Compaq has an old floppy drive sitting in it and you're worried about not having one...well, install it as well. You don't necessarily need it though.
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Ha..all of a sudden this just got more complicated, I guess the motherboard's manual will tell me how to set the bios or whatever eh?
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Yes, and yes. It can be quite overwhelming at times, but if you read the manual then you should be fine. Read it, consult it often and double or even triple check everything (every connection, every plug, every card, everything) before you plug it in.
It's not all that hard to build a computer nowadays. All of your components should come with ample documentation. Add that to a little bit of common sense and you should be just fine.
Good luck
