As a follow-up to AnandTech's original article entitled, How to Build a Computer, part 2 of this ongoing tutorial covers the software initialization portion of custom building a computer.   This article makes the assumption that you have already constructed your computer either by following the instructions in part one of this tutorial or by some other means, and you already have in your possession the software you plan to install on your system.   If not, it is recommended that you make the proper decisions and take the necessary actions to bring you to this point in the building sequence otherwise you may find yourself quite lost in the following procedure.  For those of you that have everything ready and prepared, let's get to it.

Your First Time

Although you can probably take that header out of context quite easily, the first time you boot up your newly constructed computer is the start of the entire software configuration process.  The first thing you will want to do is enter your BIOS (also referred to as CMOS) Setup Utility either by hitting the escape key, F2 or whatever keystroke is flashed up on the screen as it correlates to entering setup.  Once in the BIOS Setup you want to take the time to familiarize yourself with the controls, while some Setup Utilities may use the PageUp/PageDown keys for selection modification others may require a different approach, in any case you will definitely want to take the time to learn how to navigate your BIOS Setup. 

The BIOS

After acquainting yourself with the setup shell the first stop you will want to make will be in the General Setup section of your BIOS.  This section allows you to properly set the date and time, as well as configure your primary storage devices such as IDE Hard Drives, CD-ROM Drives, and Floppy Disks.  It is best to leave all of the settings on this screen set to Auto Detect your storage devices, after you get your system up and running for the first time without any problems you can return to this screen to manually enter in the storage settings or you can even opt to perform an IDE auto detect for all of your devices, but for now you will want to let the BIOS handle everything.  Remember that you want to get everything working perfectly (or as close to perfect as possible) before approaching any sort of system-wide tweaking.  You will want to keep in mind that if you have a Jumperless CPU Configuration setup you should properly configure your CPU in the BIOS setup before approaching anything else mentioned in this section, remember that you should never overclock your CPU until you have your OS properly installed and configured.

Next you have the BIOS Features Setup, while the name may differ depending on your BIOS it is usually referred to as something like "BIOS Features Setup" or "Advanced Setup."  The settings in here generally don't require much modification, even for tweaking purposes, but you will want to make note of a few settings in particular.  The first and definitely most annoying setting is the Quick Boot setting which, when enabled, will run through the memory count one time.  If this setting remains disabled the BIOS will count up your memory a minimum of three times, and up to as many as 5 times depending on the build of your BIOS.  This can become extremely annoying and, for most users, offers benefits that don't pertain to you.  The best thing to do is to leave this disabled, if you happen to be troubleshooting problems related directly to your system RAM then you may want to enable the setting.  Boot Up Floppy Seek is the next setting you will want to examine the status of, if you are at all concerned with the health of your floppy drive then it is highly recommended that you leave this setting disabled after initially setting up your OS.  Since you rarely have to boot from a floppy disk there is no point in accessing your floppy drive during each and every boot-up, so disabling this setting will help extend the life of your floppy drive.  Remember to do so only after you have completely setup your Operating System and no longer need to boot off of a boot-disk.  The third, and final setting you need to check while at this screen is the Boot Sequence.  Depending on whether or not your primary hard disk (the one you will be installing your main operating system on) is an IDE or SCSI device you will have to alter this setting accordingly.  The available settings are fairly self explanatory, the first boot device appears first in the list of devices the BIOS provides you with, if you happen to have an AMI WinBIOS BIOS Setup on your motherboard then the process is simplified even more.

If you are well versed in the BIOS/Software Setup of Building a Computer then you will want to assign generously slow RAM timings to your System in the Chipset Features section of your BIOS setup, otherwise you will want to leave these timings at their Default settings as provided by your motherboard manufacturer.  A setting you may or may not have included in your BIOS setup, depending on the revision of your BIOS and motherboard you may have the Video Initialize option which you want to set according to what sort of graphics accelerator you have.  If you have a PCI video card then you will want to set this option to PCI Slot, otherwise AGP should be your choice.

The final settings you will want to adjust are those in the Integrated Peripherals section of your BIOS Setup, here you will want to set the COM/Serial Port addresses to Auto and your Parallel (LPT) port to EPP + ECP mode for best compatibility results. 

That should be all you need to take care of on your first visit to the BIOS Setup, you will want to save and exit the utility preparing yourself for the next big step in setting up the software on your computer, partitioning and formatting the hard disk.

Preparing the Hard Disk

Remember that handy boot disk you had prepared?  Pop that in the floppy drive and get yourself to a DOS prompt.  If your system won't boot off of the disk you will want to go back and double check your settings in the BIOS setup and repeat this procedure.

At the DOS prompt run FDISK from your boot disk to begin partitioning your Hard Disk.  FDISK is included on all Windows 9x boot disks and is often available as an option with most other boot disks you can create, the file is also present in the WINDOWS\COMMAND directory on a Win9x computer as well as the DOS directory on DOS\3.11 systems.  If you're installing Windows NT you can simply boot off of the floppies that came with your installation package and you'll be able to partition your HDD from within the setup.  Although Windows 98 allows you to do the same, you may want to pre-partition your drives before installing if you plan on partitioning the drive into two or more sections. 

The first message you should see from FDISK, provided you're installing Windows 95 OSR2.1 or later, will be a prompt asking you if you would like to enable Large Disk Support.  Large Disk Support is nothing more than a simplified description of FAT32, if you plan on creating a partition larger than 2GB you must enable this option.  With the current size of Hard Drives it is best to enable FAT32, however if you absolutely must use FAT16 you will want to leave the option set to 'No' and continue on with the procedure.  The recommended setting is enabling FAT32 as it does optimize disk usage efficiency and can free up considerable amounts of space on larger partitions due to its allowance for smaller clusters (4KB vs 16KB - 32KB) for 2GB partitions. 

From within the FDISK utility you will want to select your primary fixed disk and choose to create a Primary DOS Partition.   You will be questioned as to whether or not you want the partition to use the maximum amount of available fixed disk space, set this to 'No' if you would like to partition your hard drive into more than one part (i.e. multiple drive letters for the same drive volume).  If not, then you can simply select 'Yes' and move on with the process.  FDISK will ask you to define how much space this volume should be allocated, you can either type in the size in Megabytes or as a percentage of the total disk space available.  Keep in mind that this will be your 'C: Drive' and will contain your operating system software and generally drivers, etc...  It is bad practice to keep all of your programs on the drive your Operating System is installed, so you don't have to worry about not leaving enough space for Windows to play around in.   The general rule of thumb is to give about 2 - 3GB of space to Windows, which will provide it with ample room for whatever it may need it for, anything more would be overkill however keep in mind that you don't want to drop below the 1GB line.  After finishing that up, you can proceed to the next step, which is setting up any other partition(s) on your fixed disks.

You will want to follow the same procedure as above, with a little twist.  First, you select the fixed disk you wish to perform the partitioning on but this time, instead of creating a Primary DOS Partition, you want to create an Extended DOS Partition.  When asked if you would like to use all available space for your Extended DOS Partition you will want to answer 'Yes' this time, even if you intend on creating more than one partition.  An Extended DOS Partition is the area of your HDD other than your Primary DOS Partition and can be re-partitioned into sub-drives called Logical DOS Partitions.  After creating an Extended DOS Partition FDISK will automatically take you to a screen that will allow you to create Logical DOS Partitions in the Extended Partition you just created.  The process from here on is identical to what you did when you created the Primary DOS Partition, not a big deal.   After creating all of your partitions you will want to exit FDISK and reboot the computer, CTRL + ALT + DEL should do the trick, there is no need to power down the system.

Now you're ready to format your drive.   Once again, with your boot disk in the drive, get to the DOS prompt and execute the format command, 'FORMAT C:', and hit the enter key.  You will only need to do this on your C: Drive, once you have Windows setup on your computer you can format the rest of the drives from within the OS which will be considerably faster than doing it from a DOS prompt.  The format shouldn't take too much time, although with larger disks it can sometimes seem like an eternity, especially if you can't wait to get your system up and running to play a little Quake 2.  Patience is the greatest virtue here, but you're almost to the point when you can begin to enjoy the computer.  Once the format is complete you have a number of options for setting up your Operating System software on the computer.

Installing the Operating System

Choose whatever method you would like to begin installing the Operating System software, the easiest method would be to copy the installation files from another hard drive to your newly formatted drive, however you shouldn't have a single problem installing the OS directly from the original CD or installation disks.  The only reason it is recommended to copy the files to your HDD first and then perform an install is because you will avoid having to load any CD-ROM drivers not to mention the speed of the install will be increased considerably.   Plus, it is always a good thing to have a copy of the OS installation files on your HDD just in case.  The installation files for Win9x are located on the CD-ROM under the directory Win95 or Win98 depending on your version of Windows. 

Installing the OS should be pretty straight forward, there are relatively few errors you can run into here provided that all of your hardware works well together and your memory timings in your BIOS aren't too aggressive for your memory.  It is good habit to create a boot disk using your newly installed OS if you are asked to unless you happen to have another working computer laying around the house.  The reason for this is so that you can be sure that you have an up-to-date, virus free, boot disk available for use if the need arises.

A typical installation of your OS should be all that you need, however take the time to look at the optional components that aren't installed by default, you might actually find something you like.  Just don't go overboard with installing useless components on your system, regardless of the size of your HDD, if you see something you know you're not going to use, by all means, don't install it.

Driver Installation

This part of the guide is assuming the best case scenario, something that may seem unlikely but actually does occur more often than one would imagine, that is, the scenario in which Windows (or your OS) starts up properly without any problems.  You will notice that your display looks quite washed out and the icons may appear to be quite large, that is obviously because your OS probably initialized itself in the safest of Video Modes: 640 x 480 pixels at an 4-bit (16 color) color depth, unless of course you happen to be one of the lucky few to have a video card your OS has driver support for out of the box.  This is probably the first thing you'll want to change since operating in a comfortable resolution/color depth will make installing all other drivers a much more pleasant experience. 

Using your supplied Manufacturer's Driver's Disk or CD, you will want to change the display properties to the type of adapter you have by using the 'Have Disk...' option under your Display Control Panel under Win9x or a similar utility depending on your OS.  Provided that you have relatively current drivers, this installation process shouldn't be a problem at all.  After all of the files have been copied your OS will ask you to restart your computer, a quick reboot should allow you to change the resolution/color depth of your current display properties to a more comfortable setting.  Allowing you to continue.

After installing your Display Drivers you will want to go ahead and install drivers for all other critical devices such as SCSI controllers, other video devices, Ethernet cards, modems, and audio devices.  If you are running Windows 95 you may want to install your motherboard manufacturer's Bus Mastering drivers in order to resolve any problems you may have with the current setup of your system.  If you have a DVD drive or are using Windows 98 then you should not install any Bus Mastering drivers since they will either cause problems with your DVD drive or with the drivers Win98 installs by default.  If you happen to have a Super7 motherboard, you will also want to install the appropriate AGP GART VxD drivers that should've been provided courtesy of your motherboard manufacturer, if not, a quick trip online should help you out tremendously as there are only three manufacturers of Socket-7 AGP Chipsets: ALi, SiS, and VIA.  For those of you with motherboards based on Intel chipsets, you have nothing to worry about as no 3rd party driver support is necessary for proper operation of the AGP port.

Provided you have all conflicts worked out, the Driver Installation shouldn't be too time consuming and should be a breeze if you've done your research properly. 

Concluding the Software Setup

Once you've installed all of your drivers properly, all you have left to do is start the installation of your favorite applications, games, and whatever else you plan on using on your new system.  There are two steps left to constructing your own computer, and next month AnandTech will concentrate on the next step: Troubleshooting.