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The first boot of the systems takes me to the BIOS. I disable the following: Legacy Diskette A:, HDD SMART monitoring (doesn’t work for this configuration). I then find the two menus I’m not totally familiar with. Under advance there is a menu JumperFree Configuration and CPU Configuration. They both mostly listed things as enabled or auto. I’ll get back to those two later.

I save changes and exit, booting in Vista 64 Ultimate now. Within a few minutes BSOD! The BSOD mentions STOP 0×0000000A, IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, and something about updating my bios. After some searching I found the following on Microsoft’s support page: Error message when you try to install Windows Vista on a computer that uses more than 3 GB of RAM: “STOP 0×0000000A”

Annoyed, I removed two sticks of ram.  I now have 2 GB and I am able to boot into Windows. I apply the update, along with a few others. Shut down, reinstall ram, boot up. No more blue screens since then.

I start installing drivers and included software now. The most notable of the bunch here is the ASUS software, ASUS AI Suite. It is an interface to the various power saving functions of the motherboard. You can also “easily” over clock and monitor your system temperatures. I did not like the UI for this software at all.

You get this gear shifter and you shift it high or low depending on your needs. High being performance and low being maximum power savings. I didn’t want or need this functionality. I wanted my clock speed to stay constant. No option at all to do this. As far as the easy over clocking, I did over clock using it to 20%. It booted and worked but I didn’t like how it made the changes. I ended up uninstalling all the ASUS software.

I thought that would stop my clock speed from changing on it’s own but it didn’t. I had to go back into the BIOS, into the advance menu. I set JumperFree Configuration to “Standard” and everything under CPU configuration was disabled. 

After that everything I almost had everything running how I wanted it to. The last issue was the way Vista was detecting my SATA hard drive. It was showing up as a removable SCSI drive. Apparently there are/were a lot of issues with the Nvidia chipset drivers. I downloaded the latest 750i nForce driver for Vista 64 and it solved my problems. I would later read I should never use the nforce drivers…but so far they’ve been fine.

I recently built a new desktop PC. I was looking to build one as a budget gaming machine. I also wanted to move into more recent technologies. I was still using a five year old single core P4 with hyper-threading, AGP graphics card, DDR 400 ram, IDE hard drives, etc.

Parts:

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E7200

Motherboard: ASUS P5N-D

RAM: Corsair XMS2 (1GB x 4)

Power Supply (PSU): Corsair vx550

Hard Drive: Seagate 7200.11 500GB 32MB Cache (SATA)

CD / DVD Burner: LITE-ON iHAS220 (SATA)

Video Card: EVGA 8800 GT 512MB

Case: COOLER MASTER Centurion

CPU Fan: Golden Orb II

A lot of these choices were based on prices, reviews, and features. The e7200 seemed very over clock friendly. The motherboard was a hard choice. There are cheaper boards and I couldn’t decide if I wanted a 750i or P45 board. I ended up with the 750i just incase I wanted to do SLi in the near future. But honestly, still unsure if I made the right choice.

I bought an aftermarket CPU fan because I really don’t like the stock Intel coolers. I’ve had bad luck with them in the past. The particular cooler I purchased doesn’t cool much more than stock but is very quite.

Installation:

Nothing substantial to note here. Was all pretty straight forward and simple. Even the CPU fan wasn’t that hard. Although if you were to put this fan on an already built computer it would be a pain. It would require you to take out the entire motherboard.

I ended up with plenty of space for all my components. The side air duct cone fit perfectly over the CPU fan. 

The side panel on this case is more annoying to remove and put back on than more expensive cases though.

Next time I’ll cover the first boot, bios, and some of the *fun* I had installing Windows Vista 64.