New Build Questions

Friends,

I am doing a new build completely from scratch. I am taking it slow to save money and to keep from screwing it up and having to redo anything. With every new piece of hardware I get, comes a new CD/DVD with installation software. I have some for my motherboard, my video card, my optical drive, my hard drive, and of course the Operating System.

My question is, which of these do I install first ? Will any CD's/DvD's read without that software first ?

Thanks for any input.

 

After all the physical components are assembled you install the operating system, mother board drivers, and then video drivers.
It is a good idea to defrag the hard drive after each installation to keep it nice and tidy.
All other software should follow.

 

Wait... Your buying parts piece by piece? Like waiting a week until you get the money and then ordering the next? That just doesn't sound right... For every week there are price drops... If that IS the case I would suggest not buying part by part... Just save your money and buy it all at one time.
But what batharoy says is correct... Mobo, video, etc

 

That is about the size of it, I am doing most of the ordering online. I didn't want to plop down a $900 credit card charge at once, so I am ordering about 2 parts a week.
My HD should be here Monday .

Oh, question about hard drives and partitions. Would I be better off putting the OS on a separate hard drive, and my data/programs on another larger HD. Or would it be better to make separate partitions on a large HD ?

 

Dont Bother With The Defrag Stuff, Its Much Less Meaningful On An Ntfs File System Thats Old Win95/98 Stuff, If You Must You Can Do It After All Drivers Programs Etc Are Installed

 

There Is Some Advantage To Installing Os On A Separate Partition, Makes Reformatting A Bit Easier

 

Today; is a FDD even needed ? Especially when there are bootable CD's ?

 

Ok... Well either way you are going to be spending $XXX amount of money... So why not just save it and spend it VIA debit? just a question... sounds like you already started the spending... so its prolly too late...
But if you HAVENT started... Start with the Case/Media drives/Powersupply for that will keep its price the longest...

 

they still come in handy ocassionaly, some school pc still have to use them, sata drivers, some diag apps etc., its always nice to have one more bootable drive for troubshooting, they only cost $10 or less

 

To save $10? Never build without a floppy, it never fails you need a floppy disk to repair something....

 

I agree we still need floppy drives (I still build PCs with them). But does anyone know why Windows XP still includes "edlin.exe" ?

 

True, true now that I think about it. I have one laying around here somewhere.

 

I got a good case : Antec Nine-Hundred ( plenty of room and cooling ),
a powerful PSU Ultra Xfinity 600Watt ( can't have too much power right ? ).

The DVD burner is an unknown: LiteOn 20x DVD/Cd burner
( I have had luck previously with Sony ).

 

I have 2 sticks of CORSAIR XMS2, 1GB each.

I have read some about setting the 'latency' on the memory for better performance.
Is this something that I need to do in the BIOS or should I just go with the defaults ?

 

Well that looks like a decent setup... And from my memory, LiteOn isnt an unknown brand... I used alot of their products, and have been happy with them. And many other people do as well. And as far as latency stuff goes, I can't remember much on that subject... But i think different RAM with higher or lower latency performs better or worse... I think the lower the latency timing the better... But I could be wrong there...