During boot up, we hear the DVD Drive spin as it starts to read the disk. Now we have a screen up that says "Welcome to Windows Setup".
We select the option to install windows and select the drive we want to install it to. Brand New Hard Drives are not Formatted, so the windows installer is setup to take care of this for you. But first, you must create what is called the "Drive Partition". Most Drives have a "100% Partition". This just means that your drive will use all of its disk space and be listed as one drive.
You can however, partition it at 50%. Doing so would "Split" your drive into two drives. So if you have a 200GB Drive, once windows loads you will actually see two 100 GB Drives. This is true even if they are on the same physical disk, the system sees them as two drives.
We elect to use just 1 partition at 100%. Once the partition is setup, we can now Format it.
If you are going to use any version of Windows XP, Format the drive using the NTFS Method. The older method of choice in Windows 95, 98, and ME was FAT32. NTFS is faster and more reliable than FAT32, and in most cases your older programs will still work on NTFS.
After the format is complete, the installer automatically begins to install windows. This step is almost on Auto-Pilot, and can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to complete. It may prompt you here and there to enter in some information or chose an option (such as your time zone) before it will continue, but there are few times it should do this.
Once Windows is installed, the system will restart itself and go into windows for the first time.
At this point, the system will ask you to setup the first profile (Username/Password, etc.), and then go into Windows.
So now you have windows loaded, but you may notice that the screen is "off". The icons are huge! This is due to the fact that windows is using a basic video driver. Once you install the drivers that came with your video card, the screen should look "normal".
This is also true for your Audio, Network Device, and other various hardware devices you have on your system. You must first install the drivers that came with the hardware before they will function properly.
As mentioned before, most of our devices (except our video card) are On Board. Our Motherboard came with a CD with the drivers for all the components we will be using. The Video Card also came with its own. We elected to install the Video Card Drivers first, as we would like to be able to see the entire screen during the rest of the setup process.
We put in the CD, and select the option for "Drivers Only". There are other little features that come with the card that we can install later - but are not needed.
During the driver install process, you may notice little "Bubble Alerts" that pop up from the System Tray (usually the lower right-hand corner of your screen where the clock is). The Bubble may say "New Hardware Found". This is normal. As you install the drivers, windows will add the drivers into its driver database for future installs, and is just letting you know that it is working.
After the video drivers are installed, we must reboot our system.
When the system comes back up, we notice that the screen does in fact look normal. We adjust the resolution to fit our monitor, and continue with the driver installs. We take out the Video Card CD, and put in our Motherboard CD.
We must say that the driver support for this motherboard is awesome! It detects the operating system you are using and makes the suggestion for what driver package to install. However, you can choose from Windows95, 98, ME, NT, XP, even Unix or Linux Drivers!
You can also hit the option for "Install All" so all the drivers install in one easy step, or install them one by one.
We of course chose Install All for WinXPPro64.
(Editors Note: Although the drivers and windows worked flawlessly with 64bit edition, we had a few software compatibility issues in other programs. So we elected to go with the standard 32 bit edition of Windows XP Pro. The process to installing 64bit or 32bit is the same.)
Now the drivers are installed and we are prompted to restart one last time.
When the system comes back on, we hear the Windows Startup Sound (Great! Audio Works). We also see a little bubble at the bottom that says updates are ready for this computer. Looks like our network is working too. We go ahead and scan for updates and download all the ones that are available.
From the time the CD was made to the time you actually get it installed, many software makers already have updates or fixes that we not caught before. So now they give you a chance to fix them. Windows works the same way. We download all our updates, and restart as needed.
Now windows is installed and has all the latest updates. All our drivers are installed and they have updates as well. At this point our system is ready for us to load our software.
Even if you already have a computer, you may be interested in some free software that you can use for it.
First, we load AVG Anti-Virus. This Anti-Virus Software is Free to use. It also updates almost on a daily basis with the latest virus protection. In our experience, AVG has at times caught viruses that Norton or McAfee have missed! Truly a must-have for people who need virus protection and don't want to spend any money on it!
Next, we load ZoneAlarm. ZoneAlarm is a Firewall program designed to keep hackers from getting into your system. After it is installed and updated, it will prompt you before ANYTHING accesses the Internet, or if something from the Internet is trying to access you. This includes Internet Explorer.
So we fire up Internet Explorer and right away we get a prompt. We elect it to "Allow" access, and check the box to remember. This way it won't prompt every time.
Another piece of software that is useful is a program called "OpenOffice". It is a great alternative to Microsoft Office. It has almost the same programs as Office Does. In fact, you can edit a Document in Microsoft Word, save it - then open it in OpenOffice and it looks the same. You can then Save it in OpenOffice, and still be able to work with it in Word. This is the same with Excel Files, even PowerPoint.
The next piece of must-have software is "FireFox". It is an alternate browser to Internet Explorer and offers many nice features that are not included in IE.
To download any of these programs or to access others, go to our Downloads Section! Its all free.
So, how does our PC compare to those name brand machines on the market? Lets find out...
Part: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, Final
