It was a pretty busy day yesterday and no sign of it letting up even today :p I finally decided to go ahead and set up that desktop machine I’ve been talking about and put in an order for all the components I needed – Pentium IV 2.4 GHz processor, 512 MB DDR RAM, Intel D845PESV motherboard, floppy drive, keyboard, 17″ Viewsonic flat monitor, speakers and 400W case. I didn’t expect to get the stuff immediately since usually you run into delays when the stuff is to be delivered to you (normal Sri Lankan problem <g>) but this time, I got the stuff within a couple of hours!
I called my Mom to come with the van we use since I go to work by motorbike and couldn’t possibly take all the stuff home with me – oh yeah, they delivered to my workplace since this was a place from where we normally get all our computer stuff – translation: a better deal :p I left work a bit early and got home and then had to go out and buy a stabilizer since we have regular power fluctuations where we live and I didn’t want to risk any damage to the system once I put together. Once I got back, I set out to put everything together.
I already had several hard disks, a PCI ATI Radeon video card, LAN card and Modem at home and the motherboard had sound built-in. So I had everything needed to put together a system – all that needed was the actual work :p I spent most of the evening in assembling the system and while I left a few bits undone – such as the USB connection to the front panel since I wasn’t sure how the connectors plugged in and the documentation wasn’t very clear – I finally got the system running. Oh yeah, did I mention that this particular motherboard is one of the only ones that they have in Sri Lanka which supports USB 2.0? That’s why I got it but I currently don’t have any USB 2.0 devices :p
I discovered that I couldn’t put in all the hard disks since I didn’t have any brackets to put them into 5.25″ drive bays but it wouldn’t have mattered even if I did have the brackets since I ran out of power connectors – the case had three fans on it and only one would plug in to the motherboard even though the motherboard had provision for all three fans :p I also discovered that my ATI Radeon card wasn’t playing well with Windows XP and so I am kind of considering buying an nVidia TNT2 AGP card with 64MB RAM for the system. Not sure if I really want to go for the extra expense but it might be worth it in the end since the machine seems to be extremely fast other than for the graphical glitches …. touch wood :p