The motherboard showed up today.... so there went my evening. Actually, I watched "Timeline" which is a movie rendition of a book I read a year or two ago. The book was moderate sci-fi/historical fiction; the movie is terrible. Don't bother.
But once the movie was over, it was all arcade parts, all the time. Got the computer assembled. Tested the D9200--works well, though the slow refresh causes significant flicker in the periphery of my vision.
I scored a cheap copy of Windows XP Pro SP2 from Dan, who is now a microsoft stooge. MS employees get all the MS stuff they can eat at really low prices (and are allowed to extend that benefit to friends and family), except of course the really (read: only) cool item in the catalog... the Xbox. But I did manage to pick up a couple optical mice and XP for less than half of the total price, so that's agreeable. The software shipped today, so in the meantime I went ahead and stole a copy from the internets. Thanks Dan, and in the meantime, Thanks Internet.
Hey, I wanted to mess with it now. Don't complain; I actually paid for a Microsoft product (first time ever, barring pre-installed OS's on computers I bought). And since I've already paid for a copy of XP, is it really stealing for me to be using it before it actually arrives at my house?
And yes, I will be wiping my "illegal" install when my "legal" copy arrives and I'll "love" every minute of it.
Hey, random question for those of you who are nerds: I installed XP as an upgrade to Win2k (thanks, internet), and it sees my 320GB HDD as a 130GB HDD. The BIOS sees the correct size... so... what's up with that? Does NTFS have an address space issue or something? Do I need to go in there with DiskMolester and partition it sans windows for this to work?? Hopefully if I just nuke the disk and install directly to XP it'll work (indicating that this was a win2k issue that got held over during the upgrade). I want my other 190GB!!
And the upgrade to XP left that really irritating dual boot selector screen, allowing me to go into 2k if for some reason I wanted to, which I don't. If for some reason I get stuck with that thing when I re-install XPlegal, is there an easy fix for getting rid of the damn thing?
XP should be able to see all 320GB; I have a 300GB drive at home and XP can see all my bits (ahem). A clean nuke+install should work, and it'll have the extra benefit of getting rid of that boot selection screen too.
The D9200 shouldn't be too bad on refresh, at least at 60hz it shouldn't. There are games that run at lower hz that if output at that will have that effect, but mostly I don't notice it.
Cool, thanks guys. Is there a commandline utility accessible from the XP boot CD or something that will allow me to manually remove my existing partition? Even when I told XP upgrade to do a fresh install it still left 2k intact, so I figure I have to force the issue.
As for the monitor, I was sorta bummed to find that the ArcadeVGA won't properly drive my regular monitor. Even at 640x480, 60Hz, the image on a regular monitor was stretched and overlapped itself. So I have to unplug the AGP card (which enables the on-mobo VGA port) to use my non-giant flickermonster monitor. Will have to do some more experimentation with the setup to determine if the flicker I'm seeing is unusual or not.
When I installed XP, one of the first stages was a "choose your partitions" screen that, among other things, allowed me to create and delete partitions wherever I wanted. There's also a "Recovery Console" included on the XP CD that does exactly what you described; it provides a command-line with very basic commands that let you create and destroy partitions; the XP setup flashes a message about entering it shortly after starting up ("Press F6 [or some other key] to enter Recovery Console" or similar).
When you do actually format the drive, be sure to split it into an OS part (30GB is more than enough for OS and apps) and a data part. That way, you won't have to nuke the entire thing when you reinstall, years in the future.