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mike@mikeshardware.co.uk

Software Installation

Once you have built your machine, you are ready to start installing software.

Setting up your hard drive

If you have purchased a new hard drive, or have decided to reformat your hard drive and start again (which is always a good idea when changing a component as significant as your motherboard), then you may want to think about partitioning up your hard drive. My hard drive is set up as follows:

My primary hard drive

For a dual operating system drive (mine is Windows Me and Windows 2000) I tend to make a shared partition for installing my applications (it saves installing them twice on two different partitions), a partition for each operating system and a Permanent partition where I keep all my valuable data, drivers, software and OS installation files. If you just use one operating system then I would strongly encourage you to partition your drive into two, with one for your OS and applications and the other as a Permanent partition (as described earlier).
Partitioning a drive like this is not too difficult. Use your bootdisk, run up FDISK and create an extended partition as well as a primary partition. In this extended partition you can create one or more logical drives for your Permanent data as well as any OSes you may wish to install.
The reason I use a Permanent partition is because it clearly separates your vital data from your non vital OS and application data. If you operating system fails then you can safely reformat you OS partition without loosing the rest of your data (remember to point stuff like your Outlook Express store folder on your Permanent drive!). It also comes in handy when you upgrade to a newer hard drive, as you can partition it up how you like and just drag across your important data. 

After partitioning up your drive and formatting your partitions, you may find it useful to copy your operating system Cabinet directory to your 'Permanent' drive in a directory such as Install\Win98SE. Installing from here means that you will never again be asked for the OS CD and your OS will also be installed faster. Of course, you need to be willing to sacrifice 121Mb for Win98SE or 153Mb for Windows Me.

Software setup for overclocking

If you are planning to overclock your system the I would seriously suggest that you use a spare hard drive to do your testing on - I always overclock on a spare hard drive, even if I have to borrow one. At the very least you should make a backup of all your important data. If you are running your CPU on the edge of its capabilities your machine can easily damage the data on your drive, usually by corrupting your FAT - I have personally experienced this a number of times.

I find it best to install a fresh copy of Win9x, the latest drivers for your video card and a copy of a CPU intensive game (I tend to use Driver, Quake3 or Unreal Tournament). It is also a very good idea to install a CPU temperature monitoring program like Motherboard Monitor, and configure it to display the CPU temperature in the system tray. That way you can monitor the temperature of your CPU without having to reboot and go into the BIOS. If you don't have any games, then running a CPU stability utility or even a 3D screensaver should be Ok. Don't fiddle about with your installation too much as you are only going to be making sure you CPU is running stable!

Overclocking