Computer building pitfalls to avoid

While I saved about $150 building this computer myself (I saved even more by using my old computer parts like case, DVD drives, hard drives and PCI cards) I have found myself wasting a lot of time troubleshooting things that I probably wouldn't have if someone else built the computer. Looking back though, I would still build it myself just for the experience and fun of putting it all together. One thing I have learned is if you don't know what it's for....you shouldn't enable it!! I ended up turning on something called Boot Manager that came with 7Tools Partition Manager. Don't enable it unless you know what you're doing. It caused me to reinstall my operating system because I didn't know what I was doing.

So here is a list of problems I ran into in this whole process:
1) My motherboard only suppors two IDE devices through the built in IDE controller. My first set of problems came when I tried to install Windows XP to the hard drive connected to the Motherboard through tehDVD-ROM drive connected to my PCI IDE controller. For some reason when the drivers were being loaded form the Windows XP CD, it could no longer read from the drive. So I ended up connecting one DVD-ROM drive and one Hard Drive to the Motherboard IDE controller to install Windows XP....everything was fine. Once installed, I connected the main hard drive and slave hard drvie to the motherboard IDE controller and all other devices to the PCI IDE controller. (by the way this was an XP repair install not a fresh clean install on a new partition)

2) I installed a couple games to the system drive but for some rerason they would not launch. Games that ran off the hard drive (like the Call of Duty 4 Demo) worked fine. The full version of Call of Duty 4 did not work. I knew my system was powerful enough to run the game since the dome worked, so I ended up installing Windows XP fresh over my old system. Same problem. The solution was to connect the DVD drives to the motherboard IDE controller instead of the PCI IDE controller. Problem solved....everything works fine now. I don't know why that makes a difference but it does. Had I known these issues, I may have researched a bit more into a motherboard with TWO IDE controllers built in.

3) 7Tools Partition Manager and Restorer 2000 are great programs worth every penny I paid for each. They have saved me on numerous occasions when I needed ot recover information off a hard drive or had to repartition a drive without blasting over it. However, in 7Tools Partition Manager there is an option for enabling a boot manager. I do not know what this does, but for some reason I enabled it anyway. BIG mistake. It caused my system to go into a never ending reboot loop where I could not get into the operating system. So I had to re-install Windows XP again. In this process I also lost my largest 250GB hard drive and all its contents. I was able to use Restorer 200 to recover most of it, but some files were corrupted and some were just too big, I had no place to put them. I also lost about 120GB of space on my drive. I'm still trying to figure that one out, but lesson learned....if you don't know what it does, don't mess with it!!

All in all it was a very enlightening learning experience to put this fancy little computer together. I don't at all regret buying the pieces from NewEgg and building it myself, I just wish I had known about the whole IDE thing earlier and ESPECIALLY I wish I had not enabled Boot Manager! Lesson learned. At this point all of my games work, my encoding software is lightning fast and both of my LCD screens look great!

Super Fast Computer!

I just completed a few benchmark testing cycles with the new computer and I am very impressed....even before overclocking! I've been using these programs for testing purposes:
CPUMark 2.1
ViMark Video Encoding Benchmark
Heavyload (for testing the overclock stability)
Nero Recode (for compressing DVD-9 into DVD-5 size)
Handbrake (for converting DVDs to AVI for my PalmTX...gives a frames per second encode speed)

The programs I've been using for monitoring temperature and clock speed:
CPUTrueSpeed
CPU-z
RightMark CPU Clock Utility

RightMark CPU Utility is great for monitoring (CPU Clock speed, temerature, performance monitor, etc). It looks like it does everything. When running, it sits in the little clock bar and just lets you know what's going on....without getting in the way! I love it.....and it's free! I've tried the provided EasyTune5 for overclocking the processor and it seems to to a great job. It's super easy and the best thing about it, is it resets your settings back to default every time you restart your computer (unless you tell it to do otherwise). I like that in case I mess something up, I can reboot and all is well again.

Even though I haven't done a LOT of speed testing due to some unforseen issues which wasted a lot of my time, I'm very impressed with the dual 2.66GHz processor. I'll see if I can post some screen shots of my testing results for comparison, but it's fast!

I've installed some new games and they look awesome! Call of Duty 4 and Rainbow Six Vegas run very smoothly and look great!

New Computer Progress

The new computer is now up and running after a few different trouble shooting sessions. After putting all the components together and powering up, the motherboard would POST (Power On Self Test) and I could get into the system BIOS, but it would not boot the operating system off the hard drive. Granted I was using my old hard drive and had my doubts it would actually boot, I was disappointed to find I couldn't even boot off the WindowsXP CD-ROM. I got as far as the "Starting Windows" blue screen after it loaded the drives, then would freeze.

My configuration at the time was the System hard drive and one slave hard drive were attached directly to the only IDE controller on the Motherboard. The two DVD-R drives were connected to a Promise PCI IDE controller card. Turns out that I needed to connect the DVD-R and the system drive to the same IDE controller on the motherboard in order to launch WindowsXP off the CD and repair my Windows XP installation on the system hard drive. Once the repair was complete, I was able to load all the new drivers for the new components and now everything is up and running smoothly. I don't think I lost any data!! I'll need to go in and reconfigure the drive letter back to the original settings but that's no big deal (especially compared to losing all my data)

The bottom line....everything works, so far it seems to be running faster than before and I didn't even have to reinstall the operating system from scratch.

Things to try with this new system:
-Compare video encoding speeds with old benchmarks
-Play old games and see if they run faster
-Try overclocking
-Eventually install Windows Vista

I'm a bit nervous to do overclocking but this Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L motherboard came with the software for overclocking. I like this idea better then going into the system BIOS and doing it from there since I don't really understand all the different settings and options.

So far so good, I'm doing a DVD encode right now using Handbrake and it seems to be only using half the processing power, I'll need to figure out how to fix that. I think on the laptop it uses 100% processors...but that runs on Vista. I shouldn't complain though, this is a juge jump in speed than my old Pentium 4 2.4GHz computer. I think it encoded at about 75fps, this is currently at 154fps.

YouTube videos on your PALM

vconvert.net allows you to enter the URL of a Youtube video and convert it to a WMV, QuickTime or Flash video and download it to your computer. The video is actually converted online using the server, then you just download the converted video, you don't need a super fast computer to get this done. I have not had any success with the WMV option, nor have I tried the Flash option. I've been able to use the QuickTimes and watch them on my computer right away.

To get them onto the PalmTX, I've used a program called PocketDivxEncoder to convert the QuickTime to an AVI file using the Divx codec. That AVI file plays very well on the PalmTX through TCPMP. PocketDivxEncoder is a pretty fast program for encoding files, but it is processor taxing so the faster your processor, the faster it will encode. This program does not work with Windows Vista.

Once you have the AVI file saved on your computer you can put it on your PalmTX SD card using a card reader. Don't try to 'sync' it through the Palm desktop software or the file will get converted again automatically to an ASF files (reducing its size and quality...again).

The videos you get from Youtube through this method aren't high quality by any means...it's Youtube for crying out loud. But if you're looking for a way to get some music videos on your Palm, it's the only way I know how.

New Computer

I'm putting together a new computer. I'll be using most of my old computer parts and upgrading to a new motherboard, processor, video card, and RAM. Hopefully it all works, but I'm a bit nervous putting it all together since I've never really done that before. I've taken pre-built bare bones systems and added to it, but never started from the motherboard and processor.

Here is my new parts list (all purchased from newegg.com for less than $500):
Motherboard- GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3L LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX
Processor- Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz LGA 775
Video Card- ASUS EN8500GT TOP/HTP/256M GeForce 8500GT 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16
RAM- G.SKILL 2GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Desktop Memory
CPU Cooler- ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 7 Pro 92mm CPU Cooler (in case I decide to vernture into overclocking)

The only thing I'm not 100% sure about it working is the RAM. I went to Gigabyte's website (manufacturer of the motherboard) and found the 'approved memory' section and G.SKILL was not on the list. I figured DDR2 800 RAM is all the same so I found the best deal and went with it....hopefully it wasn't a mistake. If it doesn't work, I suppose I'll return it to Newegg.com and see if I can get a different kind. I wanted to get one stick of 2GB RAM instead of two sticks of 1GB RAM, it makes for easier upgrades in the future if I ever decide to switch over to Windows Vista which supports over 2GB RAM.

I'll take the parts from my current computer and put them together with the new. Case with 400watt power supply, three internal IDE hard drives (7200rpm), a firewire PCI card, SONY DVD-ROM drive, Pioneer DVD+-RW drive, and a PCI IDE controller. The new motherboard only supports one IDE channel so I'll need to use the IDE controller card to run the DVD Drives and the other two hard drives. Eventually I'll switch over to SATA drives, but not yet. I'm doing only what I can afford at the moment.

All the parts should arrive on Friday. I'll let you know how it all went!