A few weeks ago my primary PC died, or at least I think it died as it started booting to a message saying "NTLoader not found". I reinstalled the OS and the reinstall would appear to work properly until the reboot and then, voila!, the error message.
I tried this with two different hard drives before giving up.
The computer was old, anyway, I reasoned, and after four years it was time for a new one so I dialed into ZipZoomFly and ordered myself up an 775 motherboard and an E6700 Duo. This should keep me going for a few more years, I thought.
I also ordered a new case, a nice midtower one that included a 350w power supply that I thought would be plenty beefy for anything I was likely to want to do with the PC.
The parts arrived and times have changed. The labeling and documentation is much better than I've seen in the past. The motherboard came with a nice sticker with jumper layouts for attaching to the inside of the case, and another with port layouts for the outside. The case was nicely layed out and roomy, and assembling the parts of my new PC went without incident (or so I thought!).
The processor and memory was installed, the hard drives mounted and the motherboard fixed into the case with the power connectors attached when my attention turned next to that very important of functions: video.
I have, over the past ten years or so, accumulated quite a collection of video cards. I noticed when I looked at the motherboard that there was no AGP slot but I didn't think this was an issue..I had a few PCI video cards and video performance wasn't a core issue for me--I would use them.
I plugged two of my newer PCI cards in and tried to boot up the system--no joy. Damn! One of the cards was an ATI card, the other an NVidia that was a little newer. I unplugged the ATI card and tried to boot again. This time I got the appropriate bios messages. I turned the system off, tried just the ATI card and found that with it as the only video card installed the system would boot too.
OK, so the 975XBX2KR (my motherboard) doesn't support two PCI video cards? Doesn't support two older PCI video cards? Not sure, I decided to order a new PCI Express x16 video card. I found that my motherboard was friendlier toward ATI Crossfire than Nvidia SLI and that folks in general liked the Radeon 2600PRO. I found one with 512MB on NewEgg and ordered it.
In a few days it arrived, I installed it and the system booted up happily with dual monitors. Joy! I settled down and started to install software. While waiting for one particularly lengthly installation to complete I started leafing through the manual that came with the video card. Buried inside (on the 2nd page, I think) I found a warning: "Do not install this card if your computer does not have a 400 watt power supply or greater". Yikes! The power supply that came with my case was only 350 watts! Perhaps I had already damaged my computer!
Time to order a new power supply. Off to Tom's Hardware I went in search of power supply reviews. The one they liked the most was made by a company called Verax. NewEgg doesn't carry Verax but they do carry Sparkle which according to this post (and others) are the same. So tomorrow I should receive my new 600W Sparkle power supply. Hopefully it will fit.
I tried this with two different hard drives before giving up.
The computer was old, anyway, I reasoned, and after four years it was time for a new one so I dialed into ZipZoomFly and ordered myself up an 775 motherboard and an E6700 Duo. This should keep me going for a few more years, I thought.
I also ordered a new case, a nice midtower one that included a 350w power supply that I thought would be plenty beefy for anything I was likely to want to do with the PC.
The parts arrived and times have changed. The labeling and documentation is much better than I've seen in the past. The motherboard came with a nice sticker with jumper layouts for attaching to the inside of the case, and another with port layouts for the outside. The case was nicely layed out and roomy, and assembling the parts of my new PC went without incident (or so I thought!).
The processor and memory was installed, the hard drives mounted and the motherboard fixed into the case with the power connectors attached when my attention turned next to that very important of functions: video.
I have, over the past ten years or so, accumulated quite a collection of video cards. I noticed when I looked at the motherboard that there was no AGP slot but I didn't think this was an issue..I had a few PCI video cards and video performance wasn't a core issue for me--I would use them.
I plugged two of my newer PCI cards in and tried to boot up the system--no joy. Damn! One of the cards was an ATI card, the other an NVidia that was a little newer. I unplugged the ATI card and tried to boot again. This time I got the appropriate bios messages. I turned the system off, tried just the ATI card and found that with it as the only video card installed the system would boot too.
OK, so the 975XBX2KR (my motherboard) doesn't support two PCI video cards? Doesn't support two older PCI video cards? Not sure, I decided to order a new PCI Express x16 video card. I found that my motherboard was friendlier toward ATI Crossfire than Nvidia SLI and that folks in general liked the Radeon 2600PRO. I found one with 512MB on NewEgg and ordered it.
In a few days it arrived, I installed it and the system booted up happily with dual monitors. Joy! I settled down and started to install software. While waiting for one particularly lengthly installation to complete I started leafing through the manual that came with the video card. Buried inside (on the 2nd page, I think) I found a warning: "Do not install this card if your computer does not have a 400 watt power supply or greater". Yikes! The power supply that came with my case was only 350 watts! Perhaps I had already damaged my computer!
Time to order a new power supply. Off to Tom's Hardware I went in search of power supply reviews. The one they liked the most was made by a company called Verax. NewEgg doesn't carry Verax but they do carry Sparkle which according to this post (and others) are the same. So tomorrow I should receive my new 600W Sparkle power supply. Hopefully it will fit.
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