Congrats Nestor!
If it's of any comfort: when installing new PC hardware, everything that can go wrong, will go wrong
I don't think I have ever installed a new piece of hardware in my PC without something else going crazy. I just installed my new ASUS A7N8X, Athlon XP2600 and 512 MB of Corsair RAM a few days ago and I spent hours trying to figure out why the machine wouldn't go beyond the POST. It just hung and did nothing. I took out all the new stuff, and put the old motherboard back in to see if there was a hardware problem - nothing. So built in the new system again, checked everything 100 times and still nothing. In the end it turned out that I just didn't realise that I had to re-install Windows. I could just boot from the CD no problem and install windows and everything worked, and here I was getting all worked up thinking I had a hardware problem. Turned out the only faulty hardware was my fucking brain!
I think I will make a checklist of things to remember when installing a new system because every time I forget things or go like "how did I do that last time".
It would include such things as:
-Make sure you have a bootable floppy disk.
-Make sure you have the windows cd rom handy.
-Do not connect any other cable than keyboard, mouse, power and monitor before you are absolutely sure you don't have to open up the case again.
-First power up with only videocard and maybe IDE devices (HD's, CD-Rom) installed.
-System update requires re-installation of windows, you can boot from the windows cd rom to install.
-BEFORE taking out your old system BACKUP IMPORTANT DATA ON C: (or whichever disk is going to be the system disk) onto a second harddisk or CD-R, because you might have to format it. This includes email addressbook, inbox/outbox files, my documents folder, my favourites, etc.
-Also make a textfile containing all the serials numbers of you software and plugins and make a copy of it on another disk. Or print it out. (having the file is handy for copy/pasting)
-Make sure you have a backup folder containing the installers for small programs that you use on your PC, like downloadaccelerator, some ftp program, an archiver (winzip, total commander), winamp, Quicktime, that sort of thing (if you have a dedicated audio pc there won't be much of this though), so that you can quickly re-install all of these handy programs without having to download it all again.
-In case of startup problems: check all connections and check them again. Are all fans blowing? Are all PCI and AGP cards correctly installed? Are your IDE cables connected the rigth way? Are your master/slave settings for IDE devices correct (check BIOS, jumpers and which connector on the cable to use)
-If, for certain software installations, you know there are some things you have to remember, write these down also so you won't forget them next time you have to install the software
These may all seem like obvious things, but seriously, I forgot nearly half of all this stuff when updating my own system, and I consider myself to know my way around the computer! So I think having a checklist of sorts is important, especially for people who have little or no experience setting up a system.
Anyone else have suggestions for this list?
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<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: King of Snake on 2003-07-05 11:04 ]</font>
