Yay!

[Mrvile]

First, I looked around in Bios and I saw that the AGP apature (I think it's called) is set to 128mb. My card is the BFG 6800GTOC, which is 256bit and 256mb DDR3, should the apature it be set to 256mb?

Also, I got a 160gb Seagate SATA hard drive, but when Windows took me to partition screen it said I only have something like 131063mb, which is like 130gb. Soooo...

One more thing. I set the system to [Boot #1: CD-ROM, Boot #2: Hard drive] to run windows install from the CD. Now when I turn on the comp it tries to boot from CD-ROM, how do I get back to Bios to change it back? Thanks.

 

[Mrvile]

Question 3 is solved. I was stupid.

Can someone answer questions 1 and 2 still?

 

[Mrvile]

Bump.

 

[Orbs]

I have no idea about GP apature. I'd try google and I'd be curious to know the answer. As for the HDD size, for every HD I've had in Windows XP, the actual size has been smaller than the drive size. I think this is because the file system needs space to store the FAT table (for FAT 32) or the NTFS block heirarchy or whatever NTFS uses.

Also, the larger the drive, the more loss you are likely to have because the larger the table will be. 30 GB does seem like a lot though. Just my best guess.

Good luck!
Jared

 

[Mrvile]

I googled it, brought me to an AAT link and people say that it really doesn't matter, but rule of thumb is to either set it to default or set it to half your video card memory. Mine is 256, so 128 is right.

 

[stevty2889]

Aperature size doesn't usualy make much of a differance. The aperature size is memory allocated to graphics proccessing if your video card is being fed more than it's memory can take. Half the graphics memory is usualy a good setting.

As for the 160gb hard drive showing as 130gb, it's because hard drive manufactures see 1gig as 1000mb, where as windows sees 1gig as 1024mb. That doesn't seem to quite account for all the space though. Assuming you are running windows xp, do you have SP1 installed? I don't have a drive that big, so I can't rember for sure, but I believe there is a 128gb limit, and LBA mode must be on in the bios, and SP1 must be installed in order for windows to see the full drive larger than 128gb.