Have a look @ the
my rig link at the bottom of my post. I possess the board, hence the comment in my previos post... "I've had zero problems with my A7V266E."
No dumb questions, only idiots that try to answer them when they don't know the problem.
Building your own rig is a good experience. Helps you understand how things work and its fun, cheaper too. When shopping for components (if you don't know of it already), head over to
Pricewatch.
Jumpers... only one you need to mess with is the CPU jumper. Move it into the Palomino.
Regarding a heatsink, I have the 8045 and it fits the board fine. Bought the motherboard @
Newegg. You could also buy a Arkua 6228 or a ThermalRight SK6. I just replaced my 8045 with a Swiftech MCX462. They aren't too expensive... about $55 vs $40 for the 8045 (just the heatsink). The MCX462 is guaranteed to fit any motherboard that has the 4 mounting holes, the 8045 isn't.
BIOS setup -> select the CPU you have (it wil l give you the option of 100/133 mhz bus speed... XP1800 1.53 GHZ = 11.5 * 133 & 1.15GHZ = 11.5*100), if you aren't using the onboard sound you will have to disable it and the onboard LAN, set boot order... should be floppy, IDE, CDRom and disabled. Hit F10 to save and reboot with a Windows98 statup disk.
No need to study DOS. It won't help you too much these days. To set things up you will need a Windows98 startup disk. Most hard drives don't come formatted. All you do is hook them/it up, and type in the format c: from the a: prompt. If you have more than one drive, do the same... it's drive letter will most likely be D:. These should be plugged into the lower blue IDE connector. If you have 2 drives... the cable has 2 HD connectors on it. The blue end of the cable goes in the motherboard. One of the drives should be set as master, the other as slave (diagram on top/back of drives will tell you where to put the jumpers). Master should use the first connector on the cable, slave the middle.
If you have a CD and CDRW, be sure the CDRW is set as master in the jumpers and CD as slave. Plug them into the black lower IDE connector. Slave gets the middle connector in the IDE cable.
I'd leave the RAID connectors unpopulated for the time being. Plug the floppy in, the red wire should be to the left when you plug it into the back of the drive, only one way to plug it into the board, it's notched. If the drive light is continually on as you boot up, just flip over the cable.
If you're going to be installing XP from the ground up. Click on the link in my post above, you will need that. Download the XP Boot/Install disk program that's appropriate for your PC, get 6 floppys handy and doubleclick the app. That will give you the disks you need to get XP going from the ground up.
Boot up, put the disks in and follow the instructions.
While setting up in XP, the first screen you come to will allow you set up some partitions if you want and format the disk. Using Win98, it formats the disk in FAT32, you also have the option to format NTFS.
Here is a brief summary of the two format types.
After that... wait for XP to boot the first time and install when required. Nice thing about XP is that it will go out and find drivers for your devices in Windows Update. Your computer will run fine and be stable with the default drivers. You can go out and DL the latest and install @ a later date.
Any other questions, just PM me (click on the orange lock to the right of my name). More than happy to help. The components you listed looked fine.
Forgot to mention, before you install, explore/open the Asus CD (not off the main menu) and copy the specific folder the XP Promise drivers are in and the 3 files that are in the main Promise folder as well onto another floppy (so you'll see winXP, 2K, 98, ME etc.. and a couple files when you open the promise folder... get the XP folder and the loose files). During the install of the first disk, hit F6 so you can install the drivers you just set up. Watch out though, it comes quick,
Don't worry about flashing, you should be fine. I haven't had the flash the BIOS for the board. It came with the latest version.
IRQs are a non-issue unless you start having problems once your up and running. Honestly, I have yet to run into a IRQ issue in any computer I've built.