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As I mentioned in my description of my first PC-building experience in January 2001, I'd originally wanted a clear plastic Nikao Submarine case for my son's PC, but they'd been unavailable so I got a generic case from CompUSA. In December 2001 I found out that the Submarine was indeed available, which inspired me to upgrade my PCs. The guts of my Athlon Thunderbird 1GHz system would go from my 3DCool case into the Submarine, for my son's use, and I'd build an AthlonXP system in the 3DCool case. What with one thing and another, which I won't go into here, I ended up buying virtually everything else new for this PC. At the time I was ordering, December 2001, the Athlon XP 1600+ was the best deal. I wanted my new PC to have RAID, I didn't want to move up to DDR memory, and I'd been very happy with my ABIT KT7 motherboard, so I got an ABIT KT7A-RAID. In order to work with the AthlonXP, the board had to be the latest version, 1.3. I figured the latest version would be what everyone was selling, and since the vendors didn't mention the version number I just ordered one -- and of course it was a v.1.0. So I returned that one and found that NewEgg had the v.1.3, so I bought it. I also got a couple of 60GB IBM Deskstar HDs for the RAID, a Pioneer 106S 16X slot-loading DVD-ROM, Visiontek Xtasy 6564 GeForce3 Ti200 video card, Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card, TEAC floppy, and three sticks of 256MB Mushkin High Performance REV2 PC133 222 memory. Of course, I had to be able to overclock the XP. While I'd used the "pencil trick" for my TBird, that won't work for the XP. So I looked here and here, and proceeded to do mine:     I used automotive window defroster repair paint to paint the bridges. I was afraid that, after doing the first bridge, the tape used to mask around the second bridge would pull off the paint from the first (and so on), but this did not happen (I let each one dry for an hour). The only thing I did different is shown in the upper left: after putting superglue in the trough between the L1 contacts, I also covered the L3 contacts with superglue, to avoid spurious contacts with wayward paint. That is the only notable part of building this PC. My only problems related to Microsoft stupidities. This was my first RAID array, using two 60GB HDs in RAID 0 to give a fast 120GB HD. This article made the setup easy, but it didn't mention this glitch: the FDISK that comes with Win98SE cannot recognize a harddrive larger than 64GB -- it sees it as a disk of the actual size minus 64 GB. So my RAID disk was originally only 56GB, which I didn't notice until after installing the OS and various things.... This is all explained in this article, which provides a fixed FDISK to download. It also turns out that Win98SE can't handle having more than 512MB of memory, and rather than ignore the extra memory it gives "Out of Memory" errors! This article explains this glitch. Rather than adjust the system settings to convince Win98 to ignore the extra memory, I just removed one of the 256MB sticks, to be retrieved when I upgrade to WinXP. Anyway, it works now, overclocked at 1533MHz (which SiSoft perceives as "1800+"):  The lack of interior clutter, and pretty primary colors, results from my getting a blue 10" single-device rounded floppy cable, a red 18" single-device rounded IDE cable for the DVD-ROM, and two yellow 18" single-device rounded IDE cables for the RAID drives. |