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"PC Building"

Ahh, my second new topic in 5 minutes, yep, I'm getting back into using my pc again. I'll be pestering people about the web site I'm working on soon if I'm not careful :^)


As a combination of cheapskate and wannabe nerd, a year ago I began to build myself a pc. I bought the case then bust my shoulder, had to leave my job and couldn't afford to continue.
Now I'm starting up again.

I have a reasonable idea of my way around a pc, I know all the internal bits I need (I think) - except cables maybe, but I should be able to figure that out when I try to put everything together...

So then there's putting everything together. I knew a guy who did it by trial and error - is that a good idea? Seemed a bit reckless to me.


Can anyone recommend a good how-to web guide?

And can I expect to have to fiddle around in bios with drivers and stuff for everything, or should the first start-up just be a matter of firing up an OS ?


Cheers

You only get one socket for them, and to be honest, I don't honestly see what the need for the "audio" cable is, most drives these days seem to play music off them easily without the need for an audio cable.

Someone will know what its for though.

Hmm. I wonder what the deal was with the pci card in the old computer then.
Aparantly there was a cable connecting the 'vga out' on the graphics card to the 'vga in' on this other card, then the monitor ran off the other card's vga out.

The dvd drive is a fairly old one, so I figure it'll be fairly slow. So it'd have to slow the HDD down a lot.
Then again, the whole point of the second optical drive was to allow me to copy cds and stuff without putting them on the HDD first, and if both opticals were on the same IDE line that'd slow everything down a lot too.

Decisions decisions...


You know those small audio cables for optical drives - red and black wires, plug in just to the right of the IDE socket?

What's the deal with that? Is it important?
I only have one socket for them on my MB, and I'm not sure whether to give it to the cd-rw or dvd...

Or can you get an adapter or something to plug them both in?

You don't really need to register with microsoft just activate windows, although it would actually be illegal microsoft are not going to bother with a single user they are after the big company's who are using a single licence for many machines, The only problem with putting an optical drive on the same IDE channel as you hard disk drive is that your hard disk drive will run slower (to the max speed of the optical drive i.e ATA33 with a max transfer rate of 33mbps when the hard disk drive on its own will run at ATA133 with a max data transfer rate of 133mbps), you would not really notice much differance as most optical drives have buffer underun on them these days and use the cache to store the data before writing it to disk, i would run both optical drives off of IDE channel 2 and the HDD off of IDE channel 1 this will give you best performance, As for the DVD thingy you should use powerdvd as it is a really good software dvd player.

Colin

Loquacious Duck wrote:
> Do DVDs also require you have a dvd pci card on your computer?

Not normally. You just get some DVD software to watch movies, and data discs should work normally.

Do DVDs also require you have a dvd pci card on your computer?

I can pillage one from the same place I got the dvd drive, but I'm not sure what the deal is with them.

(I think) The card on the other computer has a vga and s-video output on its dvd card. Can I still run the monitor through the graphics card as normal?


Also, both cd-type drives have an audio output (for a lead with red and black wires). I've got my main cd-rw wired up to the appropriate socket on the MB, should I just leave the dvd's one?

Eeeexcellent *rubs hands*

Thanks

Yes. The hard drive wouldn't need to be used in this case and using different channels would speed up the transfer of data.

If I have a dvd player, then setting it as the slave on the HDD's IDE line will let me copy fastest from CD to CD-RW, right?

Hmm. Lazer LEDs...

If I had that vent in the front of the pc, a nice LED might look good in there, and they're only cheap.

Blue (to match the case) or Amber...

*clicks there*