Building a computer help

[CheGuevara]

Hi ,
i am building my first computer
i have all the parts
and i am about to start like next weekend. I have never done such a thing, however i have opened computers and change hard drives and stuff.
My question is, is there anything i should know before i start that the manuals i have downloaded online are not telling me.
Any kind of suggestion would likely more then help since that's my first attemp at such a thing.
Thanks guys, without everyone help in Ars, i wouldn't be that far now, eventhough i haven't even started yet lol
just in case:
Asus A7V
900 Tbird
SoundBlaster Live Mp3+5.1
Encore 12x DVD (creative)
Plextor 32/12/10
Asus A7100/T GeForce 2 MX
2 30 Gig IBM Deskstar (any special setup or anything i should know because of 2 drives?)
Teac Floppy
creative Flash 56/V90 PCI modem
i also have a DSL modem
512 MB RAM Crucial PC 133
windows 2000

 

[wesman2]

Are you using the promise ATA-100 for you drives? (I don't know if these are ata-100 drives). If so you may want to check the asus site for info on booting of the promise controller, I think you need to boot from the regular controller the frist time, but I may be wrong. If you aren't using the ata-100 you should flash the 1004c bios to give you the option to disable it, that will save time on bootup. Also the SB live! cards sometimes require irq 5 reserved for legacy devices (sb legacy emulation) you can do this in the a7v bios. basicly, check out the asus site if you haven't already.

You have a lot of addons there, so when you first install the system, just use the video card, mem, and hard drive to avoid conflicts. Use that to install your OS, then add the components one at a time (well you can add the rest of the drives at once). install, restart, test, and repeat.

Once your done, it looks like you'll have a sweet system, BTW what was the total cost on this system? I'm looking to put something like this together. I'll be cutting a few corners, looks like you went near top of the line (what's with the GeForce2 MX, you cheap or something? )

Also, you may want to post this in the general hardware forum, it's kinda off topic (not that i care), but more importantly you'll get higher traffic.

 

[DarkRipper]

You could try some Promise Raid, if you feel frisky. Two drives on an ATA100 Promise Fastrak will give some nice read/write speeds if you go with a stripe set....
Edit: Just noticed you are using Win2K. Nevermind.
What do you need 512 MB of ram for? Is this going to be a server?

DR

 

[rigor2]

the a7v doesn't allow registered dimms. most 256 meggers are registered dimms.

just an fyi