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.