Finishing Touches
A PC without an operating system is just a pricey paperweight, so installing Windows 98 was our next task. We booted up the system with the Windows 98 startup disk in the floppy drive. Once we were greeted by the DOS prompt, we confirmed that the boot disk's universal CD-ROM drivers success fully recognised the DVD-ROM drive, then used FDISK to format the hard drive. We inserted the Windows 98 CD into the DVD-ROM drive, launched Setup, and followed the onscreen prompts for installing the operating system.
Once we confirmed that Windows 98 was installed and running properly, we were able to proceed with installing the remaining device drivers and components. Since Windows had loaded the default SVGA driver for the graphics card during setup, we deleted its entry in Device Manager and rebooted the system. When Windows started up the next time, it detected the graphics card and gave us the option to install a driver from the card's installation disk. We also made sure to install the graphics card's DVD movie player software and the motherboard's 4x AGP and ATA/66 drivers.
Our Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live MP3 sound card was next. We inserted it in one of the motherboard's five PCI slots and screwed the card's backplane to the chassis. We then connected the DVD-ROM drive's CD-audio cable to the sound card's AUX line. For the digital audio channel, the DVD-ROM drive was linked to the sound card by an S/PDIF digital cable. We then installed the sound card's drivers from its included CD-ROM.
Another way to save a few bucks is to use your existing sound card, but you'll likely give up some additional functionality, such as 3D sound support.
To equip our system with removable storage, we ordered an HP CD-Writer Plus 9310i CD-RW drive. First, we screwed rails to the sides of the drive, switched the DVD-ROM's jumpers to the "slave" position, made sure the CD-RW drive's jumpers were to set to "master," and placed the drive in the middle 5.25-inch bay. We connected the CD-RW drive to the motherboard's secondary IDE channel, using the same cable the DVD-ROM drive was already using, so that both drives were daisy-chained together. We linked the CD-RW drive to the sound card's CD-audio connector with a CD-audio cable, and attached a power-supply lead to the drive. Then we installed the CD-RW drive's bundled applications.
The last component added was a 3Com US Robotics 5610 56K PCI fax modem. We fit it into one of the system's PCI slots, screwed it in place, let Windows auto-detect the card, and then installed 3Com's drivers from the bundled floppy disk. As long as your old system has a 56Kbps modem, you can probably move the old modem to the new system.
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