0. Opening

The 440BX chipset is the most versatile chipset for retro computing, as it allows a single computer to run with a slow CPU for compatibility with older speed-sensitive games and a fast CPU for handling more complex 3D games. If you're just getting started with retro computing and you're not sure what you need to get in order to put together a fully working system, this reference guide will tell you everything you need to know, from all the hardware components to choose from, the BIOS setup and jumper options you'll most often deal with, and the installation of four operating systems and their respective updates. This video isn't meant to be watched in full, so please refer to the description for a table of contents you can use to navigate to whichever point is relevant to your needs.

Before you get started, you'll need some tools and plenty of different screws handy. (specify tools and exact screw sizes for common things)

(summarize all of the sections)

	I.		HARDWARE COMPONENTS
	
1. Motherboard and CPU

There's an endless variety of motherboards which use Intel's highly regarded 440BX chipset, all with a handful of significant differences. Some boards support newer CPUs, many have different assortments of expansion slots, a selection of them have additional onboard interfaces, and others have greater overclocking flexibility. The motherboard you choose will partially determine what hardware you can install.

The majority of 440BX motherboards will take Slot 1 CPUs. If you're looking for motherboards that mention they have Slot 1, be mindful that some may not even have the 440BX chipset. Slot 1 motherboards made before mid-1998 definitely do not have 440BX chipsets, rather, they either have 440FX or 440LX. Such boards are limited to having a 66MHz front side bus, so a Pentium II rated at 350MHz or faster is out of the question. Front side bus speeds are explained in further detail in section 10.

All 440BX motherboards will accept any Pentium II CPU regardless of the BIOS version installed, so if the motherboard you're getting won't come with one, you should definitely get one of whichever speed you want. If you plan to install a Pentium III, you may need to flash the motherboard's BIOS ROM to a later version. Refer to section 14 for information on how to flash the BIOS.

Depending on the motherboard you choose, you may be able to install CPUs as fast as 1.1 GHz. It's generally not clear as to which boards do support faster CPUs, but one key thing to keep in mind is that it doesn't boil down to the speed at which a CPU runs, but the voltage core. The Deschutes and Katmai cores, being the late Pentium IIs and early Pentium IIIs, both run at the same voltage, so it's generally a given that a Katmai Pentium III will run on any 440BX board from 1998 with a recent enough BIOS version, but the later Coppermine core runs at a lower voltage, which some motherboards can't handle.

Finding a fast Coppermine CPU in a slot form that runs at the 100MHz front side bus the 440BX chipset needs is a difficult challenge, but there's a way around this: get one of those "slocket" adapters. The adapter plugs into the CPU slot and accepts a Socket 370 CPU. You do have to be mindful of which one you get, as most of the different slocket adapters I've tried don't work with Coppermine CPUs, even the ones that state they do. I've had the best luck with Super Slocket III adapters.

I recommend getting a high end motherboard for your build regardless of what you plan to use it for. A good brand will usually ensure optimal stability and performance; one of the most sought after brand of boards comes from Abit, largely due to its prized jumperless overclocking utility. Other solid manufacturers include Asus, Gigabyte, AOpen, (more brands here). Intel motherboards are also a good option, although they may be stubborn with faster CPUs if the BIOS is updated, and they have virtually no overclocking capabilities.

A rule of thumb is that every good 440BX motherboard always comes with an AGP slot. This will allow you to install fast video cards for use with many hardware-accelerated 3D games and applications. If your board doesn't have one, decent PCI video cards are also out there, but they're either hard to find, completely out of place, or leaving much to be desired in regards to performance on large display resolutions. You'll also want your board to have at least one ISA slot if you want a surefire way to get sound capabilities in real mode DOS.

Some motherboards have two CPU slots, which allow for symmetric multiprocessing. There are several requirements for being able to use this feature - one, you must install two exactly matching CPUs, two, you must use an operating system that's aware of multi-CPU configurations such as Windows NT, and three, your program must also know how to use both CPUs at once. Most games released before 2000 at the earliest are not SMP aware, and those that do often require specific video drivers anyway, so dual CPU 440BX motherboards are not useful for gaming. However, you can make good use of them with a selection of workstation-oriented programs, or you can use them in a server environment. If you have a dual Slot 1 motherboard but don't plan on using two CPUs, you can just install one CPU and it'll run like any single CPU board, although you might need to install a terminator in the second slot.

Your motherboard may or may not come with a rear I/O shield. If it doesn't, don't fret; most early ATX motherboards conformed to a specific layout of ports, including the PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, two USB ports, two RS-232 serial ports, and one parallel port. Some boards may also have ports for onboard LAN or audio. Since many of these boards largely share this layout, it shouldn't be too hard to find an I/O shield that fits yours in particular.

2. Power Supply and Chassis

Ensuring the security of your investment in obsolete technology is going to ride on the power supply you use. Luckily, brand new ATX power supplies with all those extra connectors and great little 80 PLUS ratings are backwards compatible with almost any ATX motherboard you can think of. You'll want to be sure your power supply has a decently sized +5V rail, though.

Since most any new power supply has a large intake fan on the bottom, some points of concern include the fan being blocked on the top and bottom of the case, depending on which one you're using. If the power supply's mounting platform has a large enough opening on the bottom, you'll be safe on that front, except the heat emitted from the CPU underneath will end up going through the power supply unless your case has a rear exhaust fan located at the side of the I/O panel.

[IF THIS IS CONFIRMED SAFE:]
Don't worry about this so much, as even the faster Pentium IIIs won't run too hot unless you're using a dual CPU configuration. If anything, the larger fan will provide slightly better airflow in your case.

[IF THIS TURNS OUT TO BE RISKY:]
You could possibly get away with using one of these if you're using a Pentium II and some other hardware that won't run too hot, but a power supply like this is less than desirable for old cases, as it's designed to be used in a new case where it would be mounted at the bottom with the fan facing downward, taking in cold air from beneath the case.

One very important thing to mind when using a modern power supply with a 440BX board is the +5V rail. Unlike in most systems from 2002 onward, the CPU relies on this +5V rail to receive the current it needs. If your power supply has a weak +5V rail, you may not even be able to power on the system should your CPU demand too much power, as is the case with 300MHz Klamath Pentium IIs and later Coppermine Pentium IIIs.

The EVGA 450 BR may be a viable option for your system, as it has an acceptable +5V rail for even the most power-hungry P6 processors. (verification needed) You should be able to easily get away with powering many hard drives at once without overloading either of the rails, as the spindle motors use the +12V rail. If you do plan to power many devices with this, have some SATA to Molex adapters handy.

If you can't get a modern conventional power supply to work with your computer, just get a StarTech 300W unit. It has one exhaust fan on the back, effectively retaining the design that's meant to coexist with old cases while running quieter and having the benefit of being new.

Some cases may not have a surface for the power supply to lay on at all, instead expecting the power supply to have some fins that are used to fasten two additional screws to the top of the case. Many new power supplies don't have this, so (ADD STUFF HERE)

Most 440BX motherboards will come in the ATX form factor, so they can be used in a brand new case with a brand new power supply if you really want that. On the other hand, getting an ATX case from the era matching the hardware you plan to get is a real challenge. If you're looking for a quality case, I would avoid getting anything that has a rear exterior which looks like this. The quality of the metal on a case like this is atrocious, practically every edge is sharp and it's so easy to bend all the pieces.

One of the best lineups of ATX cases from the age is the In Win 500 series. Many of these cases have removable motherboard trays, allowing for the convenient installation or replacement of your motherboard and expansion cards.

A few 440BX motherboards are designed to fit in the AT form factor, but due to the size of the CPU package, most of them will have limited expansion slots. An exception to this is the Tyan Tsunami AT, which ironically has more expansion slots than an ATX case will even allow for. With both the heavily compromised AT boards and the Tsunami AT, you'll have to be careful that the AT case you want to use will even fit cleanly. If the CPU or RAM is obstructed by your case, you can't use the board in there.

AT boards using the 440BX chipset will almost certainly have connectors for both AT and ATX power supplies. If you can natively use an ATX power supply on your AT board, you should probably do that unless you don't want the soft power off feature for whatever reason. You will need to obtain a specific kind of ATX switch that will fit in the spot which normally allows for mounting a switch that's hardwared to an AT power supply.

You can get a new AT power supply from Athena Power, or you can get an ATX to AT adapter. Athena Power's AT power supply feels rather cheap and lightweight, which brings long-term reliability into question, but it's been used in my Tsunami AT computer for about a year and hasn't exhibited any suspicious problems, apart from when it arrived with a switch that wouldn't toggle properly. I had to get another switch to replace it. According to some Newegg reviewers, Athena Power's customer service is really good, so you could have things resolved through there.

3. RAM

Having plenty of RAM in your computer is very important, as it will greatly reduce the need for swapping to virtual memory on your hard drive. Since PC100 SDRAM is still being manufactured, it's incredibly easy to get new modules for cheap. If you just want a quick answer regarding how much RAM to get and what kind, you should get 256MB of PC100 SDRAM, preferrably in two 128MB modules, and make sure it's non-ECC for slightly faster performance unless you cannot tolerate memory errors. If you're overclocking or using your computer as a server, there is more to the whole picture, so stick around in this section for more information regarding the types of RAM you can use.

There's three different SDRAM speeds you can choose from, those beinge PC66, PC100, and PC133. While PC100 is the ideal choice for 440BX boards due to the matching speed with the front side bus, you can also use PC66 memory if your CPU is designed for a 66MHz front side bus, which is the case for Pentium IIs rated at 333MHz or slower and all Mendocino Celerons. A PC66 module must have an EEPROM to work on a 440BX board; this is a tiny chip often located to the side of the module. As for PC133 memory, it may or may not work in your board. Motherboards that specialize in overclocking should accept PC133 memory, as this variant of SDRAM is designed to run on a 133 MHz front side bus.

Some SDRAM modules may support error checking and correcting, or ECC for short. This technology is used to maintain the integrity of data stored in RAM, which helps prevent abnormal operations that may return incorrect results, corrupt files stores in RAM disks, or crash the system. ECC is generally more useful in servers and workstations, and may not be desirable in a gaming build due to the 2% performance penalty associated with using ECC.

To know if your module supports ECC, count the number of memory chips it has on one or both sides. If each side has 9 chips, it's an ECC module. A module with 8 chips doesn't have ECC. The 440BX chipset fully supports ECC memory, and it can generally be found for about as cheap as non-ECC memory, so if you are paranoid about memory corruption, go for it. Remember, all of the memory modules installed in your motherboard must support ECC in order for this feature to work.

The amount of memory you'll need to install ultimately depends on your needs. You can install as little as 16MB of RAM if you really want to, but this is a surefire way to cripple your system. The lack of abundant memory was a cruel reality in most 90's computers, so they had to constantly swap to a pagefile on the hard drive, which explains why those computers were much slower than they could've been, and kept making these obnoxious rattling noises every time you clicked the right mouse button.

Being at least 20 years ahead of that phase, you have the luxury of installing as much RAM as your computer will allow for super cheap, but how much do you need? I would suggest 128MB at an absolute minimum to ensure that most programs of the era run smoothly with minimal swapping. You won't need more than 256MB of RAM unless you plan to run newer operating systems such as Windows XP or excessively large programs.

I'd set a hard limit of 512MB of RAM for Windows 9x, as anything beyond that will cause erratic problems with MS-DOS programs and other things, and may even prevent the operating system from loading at all. A couple of lines can be added in two parts of SYSTEM.INI to fix some of these problems, but they'll be ignored when booting in safe mode, so it's best to not bother installing too much RAM. Windows NT or Linux will handle 1GB of RAM just fine.

(mention installing 1GB and possible BIOS issues, testing required)

Of course, if you plan to install MS-DOS 6, its included memory manager won't see beyond 64MB of RAM, and Windows 3.1 will fail to run in enhanced mode if more than 256MB of RAM is installed. You might be surprised that I'm even bringing this up, but a 440BX board is an alright starting point for pure DOS gaming with the right configuration. Sections 12 and 15 explain how you can make DOS and Windows 3.1 work correctly on this platform.

(mention low vs. high density here, are there problems on 440BX boards or earlier?)

Watch out for EDO DIMMs, because they will not work with the 440BX chipset. You can distinguish them from SDRAM by their thicker memory chips. (needs verification)

4. Disk Drives

A requirement for most any desktop computer is a fixed storage medium, which may sound like a fancy way of saying "hard drive", but is also used to refer to solid state drives in this context. For any operating system that isn't MS-DOS, I would much prefer to use a hard drive, as most old hardware and software won't make use of solid state media in the most effective way, and swapping can potentially wear down a solid state drive much faster than a mehcanical hard drive.

The most authentic fixed storage medium for a typical 440BX computer is an old IDE hard drive with a capacity around 4 to 8GB. Every 440BX motherboard comes with an integrated dual channel IDE controller with a transfer rate of 33MB/s. You can definitely use hard drives smaller than this, and you can also use larger hard drives.

The maximum capacity of your hard drive your computer will recognize depends on the motherboard and BIOS version you're using. If, for example, you install a 40GB hard drive, the BIOS may report it as only 8 or 32GB. If this happens, check for newer BIOS revisions for your motherboard online. There may be an update that mentions increasing the capacity limit. Refer to section 14 for instructions on updating the BIOS.

If no update is available to allow the full usage of larger hard drives, one reliable way to add support for this is with the use of an offboard IDE controller. The Promise Ultra series is one of the best options for newer hard drives. Not only does it recognize hard drives up to 128GB, cards starting with Ultra66 allow for faster transfer rates if you're using an 80-pin EIDE cable. Since the Promise Ultra IDE controller is non-standard, you'll need to have a driver handy for it. Also, don't plug your CD-ROM drive into a Promise IDE controller if you want to boot CDs from it. Unlike with many SCSI controllers, it simply doesn't have this capability.

(mention software disk layer)

(explain IDE channels and master/slave settings)

The high-end alternative to IDE for most old computers is SCSI, a versatile interface that can be used with many more devices per channel. With Ultra Wide SCSI or later, you can make use of some very fast hard drives that have a nominal transfer rate of at least 40MB/s and spin at 7,200 or 10,000 RPM. As cool as SCSI is, it's also a very complicated interface to learn due to the plethora of connectors it can use, some which are easily confused with the printer interface.

This reference assumes you don't intend to use external SCSI devices, so let's just focus on the internal connectors to make things simpler. There's the 50-pin narrow SCSI connector, which is often used with optical and tape drives as well as smaller hard drives. If you're not concerned about any of these and just want a good hard drive, don't worry about this.

The 68-pin wide SCSI connector is ideal for a typical SCSI build, as its 16-bit bus width allows for transmitting data at double the throughput of the 8-bit bus present in narrow SCSI.

If you're trying to find a SCSI hard drive, you have to be careful which one you buy, as there are three different types of SCSI signaling. Newer SCSI devices use low voltage differential signaling, or LVD. Devices using LVD conform to Ultra2 standards or later, and are the optimal choice for 440BX builds that require high data throughput for any number of devices.

If you wish to use devices that use Ultra1 SCSI or earlier, you'll want to make sure they are single-ended. Single-ended devices require shorter cables if many devices are to be used at faster speeds, but assuming you're only installing a few internal devices, this shouldn't be a problem in your case.

Devices with single-ended signaling also work with most LVD controllers, but if one device uses single-ended SCSI, every device on the bus will be forced to use SE mode, severely degrading the maximum performance of the bus. If you have an LVD hard drive  that comes with a jumper which activates the "Force Single-Ended" setting, remove the jumper and store it in a safe place.

Some SCSI controllers like the Adaptec 29160 have two 68-pin connectors but only one channel. In such an instance, one connector supports LVD and single-ended devices, and another exclusively works in single-ended mode. Connect all your LVD devices to the LVD/SE connector and your single-ended devices to the SE connector to ensure all devices run as fast as possible without dragging each other down.

Devices that use high voltage differential SCSI may be referred to in online listings as just "differential". HVD devices are not compatible at all with LVD or single-ended devices, and may even fry the other devices in some cases. Getting an HVD hard drive is not worth the trouble of finding the right hardware to work with it; I've had trouble finding internal HVD terminators on eBay. I had to place the drive in an external enclosure, get a differential cable and external terminator, then pick up an HVD controller just to make one of my hard drives work. Bottom line, if a device has a "D" in its model number, it probably means high voltage differential and you should avoid it.

There is also an 80-pin SCSI connector that was mainly used in servers specially built for hot swappable drives. These drives are much more common than 68-pin drives, but they require an adapter to use with a normal computer. Such adapters are readily available online for around $10.

If you're really crazy for a noisy rig, you can make good use of multiple hard drives with a RAID controller. RAID controllers support either IDE or SCSI interfaces, and have a few perks that can be used to further boost disk performance, including cache memory and hardware-based volume striping, or RAID 0.

By combining two or more preferrably identical disks into a RAID 0 array, you can theoretically multiply the speed of your new larger volume, but this solution is risky since you can also multiple the chances of losing all your data. If one drive goes, the other drives become useless. If you plan to use a striped volume for creating files with your software, you should make regular backups to a tape, a non-striped disk, or a network share.

With four or more drives, you can alleviate some of the risk by setting up a RAID 10 array, which provides volume striping plus guaranteed fault tolerance for one drive. You also have the option of using RAID 5, but I cannot recommend this in any setup, even for servers.

The cache memory in a RAID controller can usually be upgraded with a standard ECC module, but in some cases, you may need a special one with a battery. If the power goes out, any pending data in the cache will be lost unless it has a battery or your computer is plugged into an uninterruptible power supply.

(what about different drives in a RAID, how well will they do?)

(mention SATA to IDE adapters, and compatible SATA cards)

(explain why CF cards are not ideal for 440BX boards due to swapping wearing down the card but it is easier on the power supply)

(details about CD-ROM and floppy)

For added convenience, you can get an IDE or SCSI mobile rack. Adding one or more of these to your 5.25" drive bays allows you to quickly replace hard drives without opening the case. Some mobile racks even have fans, which are important for cooling fast-spinning hard drives.

As a closing note, don't get Quantum Bigfoot drives. They might have the benefits of high capacities and super retro sounds, but they'll degrade the performance of your system bigtime.

5. Video Cards

Unless you're building a server or want better support for MS-DOS and Windows 3.1, you'll want a good video card that's capable of at least some form of 3D acceleration. For starters, you should get an AGP card, as it connects to a dedicated bus which bridges directly to the CPU and RAM, allowing for vastly improved frame rates at higher resolutions (test this) and a greater abundance of texture memory.

The nVidia TNT2 Model 64 is a solid entry point for building a 440BX system, as it's one of the most common video cards of the era and just so happens to be very affordable. Although it's not a fast card, it still has robust Direct3D and OpenGL support, making it usable with many games.

(other 3D cards from 1999 and onward)

Going back to 1998, many 3D cards didn't have their OpenGL implementations fully fleshed out, practically forcing the use of software rendering to ensure smooth enough gameplay.

(talk about other brands of 3D cards from 1997-1998)

If there is one 3D accelerator that stands out from the rest, it's the frequently sought after 3dfx Voodoo2. Prior to 3dfx's partnership with STB Systems, Voodoo2 cards were produced by a variety of companies, but they are mostly the same. Some may be smaller or have faster memory than the stock 90MHz rating.

The Voodoo2 will have you covered on any game that supports its own Glide rendering engine. 3D accelerated games in Glide and Direct3D run with solid performance, and you can even combine two Voodoo2 cards into an SLI setup; in this instance, SLI means scanline interleave. With SLI, not only will your games run even faster, you gain the option to run them at 1024x768. Voodoo2 SLI scales better with a 450MHz Pentium II or any Pentium III CPU.

The preceding Voodoo1 is also an acceptable 3D accelerator, but it's nowhere near as fast as a single Voodoo2, making it better suited for a Socket 7 build with a Pentium MMX. Nonetheless, a Pentium II on a 66MHz front side bus is enough to fully saturate a Voodoo1. (testing is required to validate this)

Most cards have a VGA connector, which is still omnipresent even 32 years since its inception. These work with any VGA CRT monitor as well as many currently manufactured LCDs. Some cards made since 1999 also include a DVI connector, which is also used in new monitors. Other cards may use their own strange connectors that expect an adapter or dongle to be connected.

For instance, the Voodoo3 3500 TV has what looks sort of like a DVI connector, but with slanted edges. If you've found a Vooodoo3 3500 for sale and it doesn't come with any kind of adapter, don't be discouraged. You can purchase a $5 (name of) adapter from Monoprice. It won't fit right away, but you can take some pliers and bend the connector shield outward. You'll want it bent far enough so that every pin makes a strong connection with the connector. If the color doesn't look right on the monitor, keep trying until it does.

There are a few reasons why you might want to get a PCI video card, as some older ones can handle VESA display modes in DOS games well, and most video cards made before 1996 have drivers for Windows 3.1. Any decent 2D-only PCI card is also a good match with a Voodoo1 or Voodoo2 accelerator, or it can be used alongside another PCI or AGP card in a system running Windows 98 to allow for a multi-monitor setup.

6. Sound, Network, and Other Expansions

While a sound card is not required to use DOS or Windows, a lack of sound in your computer will ruin many games that depend on it, forcing many DOS games to fall back to the internal PC speaker, and rendering anything else totally mute. In many ways, getting the right sound card is just as important as getting the right video card. There may not be one single sound card that fits all your needs, so there's a few questions you'll need to ask yourself:

One - will I regularly run my software under real mode DOS? If you expect to run DOS games in MS-DOS 6 or MS-DOS mode in Windows 9x, you will definitely need an ISA card. Any Sound Blaster Pro or 16 card or a compatible equivalent will suffice, as most DOS games from the 90's are designed to work with Sound Blaster cards. Sound Blasters are also backwards compatible with Ad Lib synthesizers. (discuss SB emulation with PCI cards!)

Two - how much does OPL synthesis matter for me?

Three - do I need to use programs that play back tracker music? Some sound cards are capable of handling more wave channels than others through hardware. (further research required)

Four - do I want to make use of Aureal 3D or Creative EAX sound enhancement technology? If you have games which use either technology and you want to set up an environment which makes use of it, you will need a PCI sound card, and you will not have the benefits of being able to use sound in real mode DOS, at least not directly. (explain SB16 emulation)

Five - do I need to run two or more programs that play audio at the same time? One of the issues with using old sound cards in Windows is that only one program can occupy the wave output at a time. If you attempt to play a sound file while another is being played, Windows may throw a warning that tells you the wave output is busy. Some PCI sound cards like the Sound Blaster Live series remove this limitation. (is DirectX required? does it work in Windows NT4?)

(demonstrate a lot of different sound cards here)

If you expect to load everything onto the computer using floppies or CDs, or you will load everything from your main computer directly to the hard drive or CF card, you may not need a network card at all. I'd still recommend one either way, as configuring your computer to network with a file share of some sort is definitely worth it once you can get it working.

If you're planning to install a certain ISA network card like the Intel EtherExpress 16, there's a good chance the Microsoft Network Client for MS-DOS or any version of Windows since 3.11 will already have a driver for it, allowing you to get started connecting to a LAN server or the Internet out of the box. However, you'll very likely be limited to 10Mbps connection with an ISA card, and the limited bandwidth of the ISA bus will slow network transmissions to a crawl. Still, it's useful if you're using a 10Base2 token ring connection by any chance, perhaps to connect to very old XT class systems that you can't find an RJ-45 card for or to cleverly avoid getting an Ethernet switch that would possibly require you to run a wire across the kitchen floor. If you don't know what 10Base2 is, a video from BaudBand provides a good explanation; you can find it linked in the description.

Fortunately, it's not hard to find a superb network card that connects to the PCI bus and can establish a 100Mbps full duplex connection. Meet the 3Com 3C905B-TX, a card that's highly compatible with DOS 6 and many versions of Windows, and only takes up a tiny fraction of CPU usage. All you need to get this card working is the EtherCD, which is available on vogonsdrivers.org. The three directories you'll most often use in the EtherCD are the root directory, which contains drivers for Windows 9x, NT4, and 2000, the NDIS directory, which contains a driver for the DOS network client, and WFW311, which obviously contains the 3Com driver specifically made for Windows for Workgroups 3.11.

Intel PRO/100 and PRO/100+ cards are also robust, as their hardware provides many of the same benefits the as the 3Com network cards. Even so, finding the right Intel network drivers to install for your operating system may be more complicated. A link to the driver I regularly use is provided in the description.

If you want to use PXE, the 3Com 3C905C series comes with a Managed Boot Agent ROM soldered to the card. This is my network card of choice for pretty much any old PCI computer I can build, as it can be configured to prompt the user to press N on the keyboard to boot from the network, assuming the motherboard has AMIBIOS or AwardBIOS. This feature is very useful for initiating unattended installations and not having to rearrange the boot order after the setup utility reboots.

Some later Intel PRO/100 cards also have onboard boot ROMs. These work just as well, but they don't have that convenient 3 second key prompt. Also, PRO/100 S cards have the boot agent disabled in the ROM by default, and a specific program must be copied to a DOS boot floppy and run in order to enable it. For earlier PRO/100 cards that have empty ROM sockets, you can find a Boot Agent ROM as part of a package linked in the description, and program a 64 or 128 kilobyte EEPROM with it. Insert the ROM into the socket, and your card will now have PXE functionality added.

A gigabit network card is impractical for a 440BX build, as the 125MB/s transfer rate will either take up too much of the 133MB/s bandwidth limit on the PCI bus or fail to be fully saturated due to the slow hard drive and/or CPU. Some 440GX motherboards, which are basically server-oriented equivalents of 440BX, may have a 64-bit PCI slot you can use with a gigabit ethernet card to make room for more bandwidth on the bus. (440GX point probably unnecessary distraction and should be mentioned alongside 440LX elsewhere)

Many computers of the day included a PCI or ISA modem to get online, access a bulletin board with a terminal emulator, or dial a phone with a program. In the present era, POTS lines have been all but abandoned in favor of cellular telephones, so unless you're in a residence or organization that needs to use landline, or you want to test phone equipment or authentically slow connections, you don't need a modem for anything except the Windows 95 Registration Wizard, which nobody used. An external RS-232 hardware modem is the easiest to set up and work with should you need one.

If you plan to install Windows 98 or 2000, you can install a USB 2.0 card if you really need the extra throughput for any generic flash drive you may use to transfer files from your main computer to your 440BX build. Most other high speed USB devices don't have drivers for Windows 98, so you might want to stick with the two onboard USB 1.1 ports.

You can install additional serial or parallel ports if desired, but you probably don't need them unless you're setting up a system that accepts multiple dial-up connections or you need to share multiple printers on a network. To maximize bandwidth for a device that connects to a parallel port, make sure it's configured to ECP mode if available.



7. Perhipherals

Gathering the basic perhipherals you'll need for your system is usually straightforward. At minimum, all you need is a PS/2 keyboard and mouse, and a monitor capable of outputting VGA. Depending on which motherboard you use, you may also be able to get away with using a USB keyboard or mouse, but not all boards are guaranteed to provide reliable legacy device emulation for USB perhipherals, so Windows 98 is the only operating system covered here that can handle your USB mouse reliably due to its native USB support.

You should be able to use an IBM Model M keyboard with most 440BX computers. These keyboards are known to draw too much current for the status LEDs, and as such may not work on later computers.

Some USB mice are PS/2 compatible, including Microsoft's optical wheel mouse called "Wheel Mouse Optical". A mouse with dual compatibility can be plugged into an adapter which plugs into the PS/2 mouse port. Some RS-232 serial mice are also compatible with the PS/2 port. If you have such a mouse and it has a serial connector by default, you can plug it into an adapter that plugs into a PS/2 mouse port. It's always best practice to use a PS/2 mouse whenever possible, and Sections 16-18 will explain how to install software that enables much smoother tracking on a PS/2 mouse.

Using an LCD monitor with your video card is risk free, as pretty much all modern LCDs have built-in protection against excessive refresh rates and they don't have the same kind of mechanism that could potentially damage CRTs. 4:3 LCDs are readily available at a lot of thrift stores.

A CRT will almost certainly give you a better picture, especially at low resolutions. Unless your CRT is Plug and Play capable, which is the case for many monitors manufactured since 1995, you have to be careful what you set the resolution and refresh rate to, as not all CRTs have protection mechanisms against going over their specifications. You should try to find documentation for your monitor regarding which resolutions are safe to use at their corresponding refresh rates if at all possible.

Plug and Play monitors will report to Windows 9x what resolutions and refresh rates they're capable of to ensure you don't go over the monitor's specifications when changing the display settings in the Control Panel. All VGA monitors will handle any color depth, so that's not of concern. When in doubt, 640x480 at 60Hz is the safest display setting for every VGA monitor.

If you want to try using a higher resolution or refresh rate to gain more desktop space or reduce flickering, respectively, keep your finger on the power switch and be reflexively prepared to switch the monitor off if the image flips out when you apply your new settings. If the display settings are bad, turn the monitor off and press the escape key or wait 15 seconds to restore the old settings.

Newer CRT montiors have protections against settings out of their ranges. These kinds of monitors tend to blank the screen for a second in between changing display settings.

You can use whatever speaker set you want, as long as it has a 3.5mm plug. There are some things you'll need to mind when you plug in your speakers, though. Older sound cards tend to have two different kinds of line output ports, one of them being labeled "Line Out" and possibly colored green. This is the one you'll want for sure.

The "Speaker Out" port is made only for passive speakers, which are both uncommon and undesirable since there's usually no way to physically control the volume unless your sound card has a volume ring. One example of passive speakers meant to be plugged into the speaker out port are those manufactured by Polkaudio for Hewelett Packard systems. Some cards may have a line out port that adapts to both powered and passive speakers; you can plug either one into this. Some sound cards like the Sound Blaster PCI 128 may have jumper settings to configure each output port to function as either a line out port or a speaker out port. Assuming you'll never use speaker out, set both ports to line out.

If you plan to use a joystick or gamepad with your computer, it'll plug in to the game port on your sound card. This plug is not to be confused with a 10BASE5 interface found on some network cards. To use a MIDI device with your sound card, plug in a breakout adapter to the joystick port. This adapter should provide MIDI in and out plugs you can insert into any General MIDI device, like a keyboard or wavetable interface. Some MIDI breakouts also provide a connector for a joystick, effectively permitting the connection of both devices to the same sound card.

Any devices that plug into a wall outlet, including the computer and monitor, should be plugged in to a surge protector at minimum. If you really need to protect your equipment from surges and power outages, you should invest in an uninterruptible power supply, which is basically a battery backup system that can keep your system running long enough to survive brief blackouts or shut down the system gracefully when the battery runs too low. Configuring a UPS to gracefully shut down the system requires an RS-232 connection and a program that can communicate with the unit. A section in the software installation guides explains how to do this.

As a reminder, never plug a surge protector into another surge protector or UPS and vice versa. Make sure your power equipment is designed to work with your country's standard electrical outlet.

8. Cooling

Even in older computers that don't necessarily consume that much power, cooling is necessary to ensure their stability and longevity. This is definitely the case with CPUs, as they can potentially overheat under heavy load in a poorly ventilated system. Some processors will have passive heatsinks attached, but their reliability depends on how well ventilated your case is. If your case has a rear 80mm or larger fan right behind the processor and the heatsink is really large, you should be able to get away with using it on slower speeds. Otherwise, you should replace the heatsink with an active one, or even just attach another fan to the existing heatsink. In fact, that might work better due to the larger fan and heatsink allowing heat to be dissipated in greater volumes.

(replacing thermal paste here, need to learn how to do this)

Many video cards are capable of running without any cooling modifications, but there are several which could do much better with it, particularly the 3dfx cards. Voodoo2 cards come with no heatsinks, so you have two options - either cleverly place a fan close to one or two of the cards depending on your setup, or two, apply 25mm or 27mm heatsinks to the cards with thermal adhesive.

The latter solution is not recommended because of how delicate of a procedure it is. You have to place just enough glue on each chip so as to not get any to fall off of them and short out the circuitry, and once the heatsink's been applied, you'll most likely never be able to remove it. I'll demonstrate with an 8MB card that's in need of new capacitors so I don't end up stifling this absurdly giant project. (or some cheaper card???) Place a small dot of glue, and remove excess glue if necessary. Carefully apply the heatsink, try not to make it crooked, and repeat the process for the left and right chips if desired. Store the thermal glue in a refridgerator when you're done with it.

Although heatsinks are helpful in making Voodoo2 cards run cooler, you don't need them. Just mount a fan as close to the cards as you can, and get creative if you have to. When you change your mind, just remove the fan from the case. (mention using side vents and zipties to mount fan towards cards)

Voodoo3 cards also don't necessarily need a fan, but they're known to run very hot without one, to the point where the heatsink only covers the bare minimum of what cooling one requires. With a set of short (SPECIFY LENGTH AND THREAD!!!) wood screws and a 40, 50, or 60mm fan, adding superior cooling to your Voodoo3 card is trivial. All you'll end up doing is scratching the heatsink fins a bit.

Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 cards come with average heatsinks and fans stuck on to the chips with thermal glue of questionable quality, but they can also accept VGA coolers. You'll probably have to make modifications to the mouting brackets, but once you have that done, you can clean up the VSA-100 chips and apply new thermal paste to them. (RESEARCH AND TESTING REQUIRED)

If you're building a 440BX computer with a good modern case, concerns over ventilation are practically non-existent. You'll be able to make use of plenty of large fans. One thing you should mind, though, is that fan headers on 440BX motherboards often aren't capabale of powering fans larger than 92mm at best. You should connect your fans to Molex power adapters, where they will run at full speed. If they run too loud, you can buy a fan controller; even three fans spinning at the lowest possible speed should be more than enough to keep all of your components cool.

When it comes to ventilating older cases, you may need to pay a lot more attention to what you're doing. At best, you may find a spot on the rear of the case that allows for mounting a fan, but it's entirely possible you'll only have mere vent holes. The only rear ventilation you may be able to have will come from the power supply's exhaust fan, which surely won't do much.

In fact, most old cases only have one true fan mount located at the bottom front, and you shouldn't expect it to pull much air in due to the sparse vent holes at the front of the case. If your case has one or two rear fan mounts above the power supply, use them. They may not cool your CPU that much, but they'll definitely help blow out whatever hot air rises through the tight space. In some cases, you can try to mount a small fan to the rear vents behind the CPU or something else with a couple of plastic zipties.

Fan brands are usually trivial if all you want is adequate cooling. My definition of a good fan is one that will provide sufficient airflow at low noise levels, and have only a 3-pin connector instead of some other clunky sort of wiring. Two premium brands with polar opposite philosophies tend to stand out if you're serious about cooling: Delta and Noctua.

Delta fans are known for being abnormally loud and providing nearly unparalleled air pressure, which is necessary in densely packed servers. You definitely don't want their fastest fans in your computer. Even if you and your entire household can miraculously put up with the noise, they'll often draw too much current for fan headers on most motherboards. Delta's slower fans that draw around half an amp of current, on the other hand, are viable options if you have a lot of components close together and need the extra airflow for them. You can plug one in to the chassis fan header to allow the motherboard to control its speed based on the temperatures of certain components.

In most cases, you'll only need one hard drive and a few expansion cards that don't really run hot, making Delta fans impractical for your setup. If anything, you might want reduced noise more than anything else. That's where Noctua comes in. Their distinct ice cream sundae-colored fans don't seem to match up with any case's coloring, but the specialized acoustics in these fans will provide great airflow at very low noise levels.

To help you decide which fans you want, I'll provide a noise comparison between three different fan brands running at various speeds, all used in combination with a modern power supply. (record fan noise levels here) These were all recorded with a microphone placed inside the case, so the noise you'll actually hear from the fans may be slightly quieter depending on where your computer will be placed. No hard drives were powered on in the preceding recordings.

Cable management is difficult in older cases, but you should try everything you can to make sure as little airflow is being blocked as possible. If you're really bad at managing ribbon cables, you can always obtain round cables to help minimize air blockage.

If you don't have enough options for ventilating your case, a cooler that mounts onto an expansion bracket always helps. I recommend mounting such a cooler directly underneath the hottest expansion card in your system, such as a 3D accelerator or RAID controller.

If all else fails, open the case and place a floor fan next to your computer. Be mindful not to knock over the fan or get hazardous debris into the case, in case there's something that could jam the internal fans or short the circuitry.
	
	II. 	HARDWARE CONFIGURATION
	
9. Assembling the Computer

This guide assumes you're building a computer with an empty case, but complete systems actually tend to provide better value than standalone cases that pop up on eBay from time to time, because they'll come with extra parts which you can take out for later use or keep in the case. Many of the following procedures can be performed in reverse to remove whatever you don't want in your 440BX computer.

Not all cases are designed in the same way, so you'll need to determine how your case is meant to be opened by looking at the back for any screws that may be holding it in place. Many cases tend to have a single door that needs to be pulled back, and it's held in place by a number of screws. Other cases only require you to remove the side door to access most of the components. A selection of full tower cases may require you to remove the top door before you can remove the left and right doors. Some cases use toolless methods of opening the case; some may require you to pull out the front panel holding the doors in place, and others have a slider or thumb screw holding one or both doors in place.

You can install some of the components in whichever order works for you, but I'll start with the power supply. In old cases, the power supply is mounted either above or to the side of the motherboard. If you're installing a power supply with an intake fan on the bottom, make sure it's not blocked. Refer to section 2 for advice on which power supply to install in your case. Align the power supply's mounting holes with those on the back of the case, and fasten four screws. You'll connect the power supply to your components later on.

If your motherboard doesn't have retention brackets already mounted, you'll need to take two of these pieces and push them through some holes from the bottom. Lay the board flat, and place your retention brackets over the screw threads so they face each other. Use a Phillips head screwdriver to fasten the bolts.

Before mounting the motherboard into your case, you may need to adjust some jumpers depending on the type of CPU you have. If you have an SECC Pentium II, which looks like this, or a rare engineering sample, you'll need to adjust the clock multiplier. This is not necessary for Celeron and Pentium III CPUs, as well as later SECC2 Pentium IIs because they have locked multipliers. Refer to section 10 for more information on modifying jumpers for your motherboard and other hardware.

Mounting the motherboard usually involves placing it straight into the case once you have the necessary brass screws in place, but some cases have an intriguing mechanism that makes installing or replacing a motherboard a pinch. You can slide or pull out a large tray which holds the motherboard. In some cases, namely In Win's 500 series, it'll even hold the expansion cards, allowing you to install them before inserting the tray back into the case... unless one card is blocking the way, of course. Other trays require you to remove all the expansion cards first.

Take note of each mounting hole your motherboard has, and fasten brass screws to the corresponding holes in the case with a hex driver. If you case already has certain holes elevated, don't fasten any brass screws to them. Align your motherboard with the brass screws and begin fastening screws to them, starting with two opposite corners. This will help ensure your board is properly aligned so you can easily fasten the rest of the screws. To avoid damaging the motherboard, make sure the screws are only hand-tight. You can use non-metallic washers with the screws to prevent the possibility of scratching the board if desired.

If you have a motherboard tray which allows it, you can install your expansion cards right now, but be mindful of any connectors on the motherboard which may be obstructed by any of your cards; you may have to install them after inserting the tray and plugging in the respective cable to the connector for effective management. In any case, reinstall the tray accordingly once you're done working with it.

(explain assembly of slot and socket CPUs)

Once your CPU is ready, it's just a matter of popping it into the large slot connector, locking it in place, and connecting the fan to the CPU fan header. The fan should be to the right of the CPU. If you're installing a slocket adapter, you may need to push in some retention clips to hold the adapter in place between the brackets. For SECC2 CPUs, you should also add a long retention clip on top if you have one.

(how to tell which direction the fan blows air)

Installing additional fans may not be mandatory in your computer, as a handful of computers I've received didn't come with front or rear fans installed. You should get some regardless, as a pair of good 80mm fans should set you back only around $10 to $15. The additional airflow will prolong the life of your components and reduce the likelihood of abnormalities such as overheating, erroneous operations, slowdowns, and lockups.

Computer cases and components are designed to expect airflow being taken in from the front of the computer, and exhausted through the back. As such, it's very important that you mind the direction which you mount your fans. See these four braces on this side of this fan? Air is moved out to this side of the fan, whereas the other side without said braces takes in such air. The side of the fan with the braces must face the rear of the case.

Many old cases have a place to mount a front fan, which is often held in place by a plastic shell. You should be able to remove this holder and pop a fan in there easily, provided it's 25mm thick.

(mention 133MB/s or 266MB/s limit of PCI bus and SCSI termination)

(advise against plugging a monitor into an AT power supply's pass-through plug)

	
10. Jumpers

Depending on the hardware you're using and what configuration your hardware came in, you may not need to modify any jumpers at all. In the majority of cases, the only jumpers you'll really need to worry about pertain to the front side bus speed, and if you're installing an early Pentium II, the clock multiplier. There are no jumpers for setting the CPU voltage as is the case with Socket 3, 5, or 7 motherboards; that's taken care of automatically on this platform.

Jumpers are small blocks designed to electrically short two pins. A circuit board recognizes that the pins are shorted and uses them to assign certain settings as the computer starts up. Jumper pins often come in rows of two or three pins. If a setting depends on whether a jumper is "off" or "on", as is often the case with a set of two jumper pins, "off" means no jumper is attached to the pins, and "on" means one is.

A set of three jumper pins requires that two of the three pins are shorted starting at either the first or second pin. A "1" next to the pin set on the motherboard or its diagram in the manual indicates where the first pin is. Sometimes, no jumper is applied to a set of three pins to activate a third option corresponding to it.

Some builders may leave a jumper hanging on one pin to hold it in place without shorting anything. This is convenient if you're repeatedly changing jumpers, say, to tweak an overclocked configuration, but it's better practice to store all your jumpers in a safe place.

Some motherboards may use DIP switches in place of jumpers to set certain options like the speed of the CPU. DIP switches are more convenient than jumpers since you don't have to handle tiny plastic blocks; just use your fingernail or the end of a needle or paperclip to adjust the switches as needed.

If you're using a Pentium II rated at 333MHz or slower or any Mendocino Celeron, the front side bus speed should be set to 66MHz. For Pentium II CPUs rated at 350MHz or faster and most Pentium IIIs, setting it to 100MHz will ensure they run at their full speed. You can attempt to overclock your CPU by raising the front side bus beyond the CPU's intended speed; see Section 26 for more details.

The clock multiplier may be denoted by either a literal factor or the resulting CPU speed according to the front side bus. If the motherboard's labels use the former, this table shows the multipliers that correspond to your CPU and front side bus. If your motherboard doesn't have any obvious labels indicating which jumpers are for setting the relevant speeds, either you'll have to find a manual for your motherboard, or it simply doesn't allow manual configuration of the CPU and front side bus.

Some high-end motherboards may include the option to configure the CPU and bus speeds from within the BIOS. To enable this on the Asus P3B-F, set all DIP swithces to OFF and (another jumper here?)

Many motherboards will have a set of jumpers you can short for about two seconds to clear all of the CMOS settings. Others, especially those from Asus, may opt for solder pads instead; in either case, you don't necessarily need a jumper to short them. Just set the end of a flat head screwdriver onto the pins or pads and hold them for a while, then release. All of the settings will be cleared, inclduing the date and time.

Some old ISA cards have jumpers for interrupt requests and I/O addresses that need to be manually set in order to ensure they don't conflict with other hardware in the computer. All 440BX motherboards are smart enough to configure every Plug and Play device automatically, respecting the settings of legacy ISA devices. If you plan to install a legacy ISA card, you'll need to refer to the labels on the card or its respective documentation. For an ISA sound card, you should use IRQ 5 or 7; anything else may conflict with a PCI card or the onboard IDE controller. Refer to section 12 for information on how to reserve system resources for your ISA card.

11. IRQ Conflicts

While 440BX motherboards are capable of managing which interrupt requests are to be assigned to what devices you install, you can still run into IRQ conflicts. IRQ conflicts can prevent your computer from completing the POST or cause the system to function abnormally, so they should be resolved immediately.

If you have many PCI cards installed, it's possible one of them will not function depending on how you have them arranged. A typical 440BX motherboard will only have four master PCI slots available to use, even if there are five or six PCI slots. (need to research how master and slave slots work)

12. BIOS Settings

Before you can get started with installing your operating system, you'll need to configure some things in the BIOS setup utility. The BIOS setup utility can be accessed by pressing a key as requested by the power on self test screen; this is usually F1, F2, or Delete. If you don't see a POST screen at this point or hear any beeps, refer to section (number) for ways to resolve issues with booting.

Some motherboards use different BIOS setup utilities from others, but will generally have the same kinds of settings to configure, with slight differences. The most common BIOS from this era is AwardBIOS, with some workstation and server motherboards using AMIBIOS or PhoenixBIOS. I'll use AwardBIOS to explain most of the possible settings, and specify any differences you'll need to know for the other vendors.

To change a setting in AwardBIOS, use the Page Up and Page Down keys. The arrow keys are used for navigating through the different settings. You can press F1 on most settings to view a list of options you can choose from.

The very first things you should configure are on the first page, which contains settings for the date and time, as well as two floppy drives and four IDE devices. For practical usage, you'll want to set the clock to the current time, but if you plan to run some beta version of Windows on your computer, the year may need to be set back earlier to prevent it from expiring. If you can't set the year back far enough, you'll have to change it from an MS-DOS startup disk. (needs verification)

In most cases, you'll only have a 1.44MB floppy drive as the A: drive. If you have connected a second floppy drive, specify it in the setting for the B: drive. For the IDE settings, you have two ways to approach the whole thing - one, you can set everything to "Auto", so each device is automatically detected and configured during POST. Two, you can create hard entries for each hard drive and disable the unused entries by selecting "None".

The latter is useful for speeding up boot time if you intend to keep the same IDE configuration in the long run, but if you change any IDE devices, you'll have to go back to the setup utility to adjust your configuration. To automatically detect hard drive parameters for all your devices, use the IDE detection utility. If at least one of your devices is not a hard drive, you may need to set it to "Auto" in order to allow it to be detected regardless of the configuration method you plan to use.



(information about enabling PCI 2.1 compliance)

(explain the danger of DPMS with older CRTs)

13. Expansion Card Onboard ROMs



14. BIOS Flashing


	
	III.	SOFTWARE INSTALLATION
	
15. Installing MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 (or 3.11)

A standalone installation of MS-DOS is a bit out of place for a Pentium II, especially in combination with Windows 3.1. There are several reasons for this: for one, most DOS programs aren't designed with the Pentium II in mind. Some later programs will take advantage of its MMX instruction set, but having such a fast processor can either work in your favor or against it. Speed-sensitive DOS games are bound to be unplayable unless you take measures to slow down your system as much as possible, such as by underclocking the front side bus and CPU multiplier, as well as disable the external and even internal caches in the BIOS setup.

Another issue with MS-DOS is that the supplied memory managers HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE can only address up to 64 megabytes of RAM, and anything beyond that is ignored. This isn't so important since almost all DOS programs won't make use of any memory beyond that limit, and you may as well remove some memory sticks unless you plan to load a better memory manager such as HIMEMX. If you have more than 256 megabytes installed, Windows 3.1 will outright fail to load in enhanced mode.

Most importantly, you'll need to make sure your hardware can run in real mode DOS. Most any video card will work, as drivers are unnecessary for these devices in DOS programs. Other PCI devices like network and SCSI cards may also work if DOS drivers are available for them, but for sound hardware, it's always better to try to get an ISA sound card.

You can attain reliable compatibility with real-mode DOS programs if you install Windows 95 or 98, but you may want to install MS-DOS 6.22 if you need a dedicated DOS machine that's slowed down to the point where it simply cannot run Windows reliably, but can potentially run old DOS games at playable speeds. If all you have handy is a 440BX motherboard or something similar, such a setup can be pulled off without too much of a hassle; in fact, it's easier than setting up a 486.

This section assumes you'll install MS-DOS and Windows from floppy disks, but there is a much faster way of going about it covered in a later section. Start by inserting the first MS-DOS setup disk in the A: drive you've configured. In a minute, it should boot up. The setup program is very straightforward; if your primary hard drive is blank, it will automatically add one partition which takes up a maximum of 2GB.

If your hard drive has existing partitions that you want to erase, you'll need to exit Setup and run FDISK. If you need a different partition layout or you want to use multiple hard drives, you can configure them after Setup completes; our main concern at this point is creating a primary partition which DOS will boot from.

(elaborate all the steps in working with FDISK)
(on second thought, this all should be in a separate section)
Select option 4 to view the partitions on your first hard disk. If it turns out there are no partitions available, you can create a primary partition now by selecting option 1. On this screen, select option 1 to create a primary partition. You will be asked if you want to use the largest possible partition size; if you choose "yes", it will take care of everything and let you know when it's ready to reboot. If you choose "no", specify the percentage or number of megabytes you want to allocate for the primary partition. Afterwards, select option 2 and mark the drive as bootable.

If you have an existing FAT16 partition, you don't have to do anything in FDISK unless you need a different primary partition size, which requires deleting the partition and creating a new one from this program. Otherwise, you can install MS-DOS on top of this partition as is if you want to keep most of your data intact. It's best practice to install any operating system to an empty parition, so after backing up any personal data, format the partition with the /Q switch; this will invoke a quick format, which clears the drive in a matter of seconds.

If you have a FAT32, NTFS, or some other type of partition on the drive, you won't be able to install MS-DOS 6 on it. You must back up any personal data on it with another compatible operating system if necessary. If you're ready to delete it at this point, select option 3, then option 1.

If you have multiple FAT16 partitions on your disk and you want to start from scratch, you must first delete each logical drive in the extended partition. Select option 3, and then option 3 to begin deleting them. You may need to type their volume labels for confirmation. Once every logical partition is deleted, you'll be sent back to the main menu. Select option 3, then option 2 to delete the extended partition. Finally, select option 3, then option 1 to delete the primary partition. Create a new partition accordingly.

FDISK's handling of partitions is notoriously limited, and in some cases you may not be able to empty the partition table using it. If this happens, you can either run a third-party partition manager in DOS or a live session of Linux (for the latter, SliTaz is favorable for older systems), or you can use the DEBUG program in DOS. (is it on the setup disk?!) I find the debug method most convenient for clearing the partition table, but you'll need to type the lines of code exactly as shown here. (mention line where number could be different according to which drive to wipe) Write down this procedure on a notecard for future reference. (credit ComputerHope for this solution)

After you're done with FDISK, leave the setup disk in the drive, exit Setup when it loads, format the drive, and reload Setup.

Of course, if you let Setup configure a partition for you, it automatically formats the hard drive after rebooting, and prompts you where to install the majority of the included programs. It also prompts you for a language and keyboard layout. You can change the date and time from here if necessary. Afterwards, just insert succeeding setup disks when prompted, and you'll have a fairly minimalistic configuration set up for you on the first boot.

Configuring MS-DOS the way you want it is a matter of strenuous manual configuration, although many driver setup programs will automatically add entries to boot files CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT as needed. On top of that, some premade configurations available online can be copied over to your system to get you started quickly, including a superb configuration set courtesy of PhilsComputerLab that accomodates for most practical boot configurations. A link to this is available in the description, but if you want to make your own, I'll show you how to do that now.

(explain loading programs and drivers to high memory)

16. Installing Windows 95 OSR2 with USB Supplement

(need to mention "updated" USB supplement from September 1997)

(add note about running Windows 95 on P3; SSE is not natively supported and enabling it poses risks with more than one SSE program running)

There are several versions of Windows 95 you can choose from. The original retail version, sometimes referred to as "Windows 95 RTM or A", has several limitations which make it inappropriate for most 440BX builds: it only supports the FAT16 file system, limiting you to 2GB per partition like in MS-DOS. It's also impossible to add support for AGP extensions and USB devices, so your AGP card will be forced to function as a PCI device and be constrained on performance, and you won't be able to use a flash drive to conveniently transfer files.

Strangely, this version was never sold directly to end users, mainly intended to be bundled with new systems supplied by manufacturers, although some sellers worked around this by bundling Windows 95B with any computer component to sell to consumers.

For this reason, you should install Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2, sometimes referred to as "Windows 95B". This version of Windows 95 supports FAT32 natively, allowing for much larger partitions and smaller block sizes depending on the size of a partition. (show block size comparison between FAT16 and FAT32) You can also install the USB supplement on Windows 95B to enable USB connectivity and take full advantage of your AGP card. Windows 95B with the USB supplement is sometimes referred to as OSR2.1.

There's another OEM-exclusive version of Windows 95, OEM Service Release 2.5, sometimes referred to as "Windows 95C". In addition to everything Windows 95B has, comes bundled with additional software packages like Internet Explorer 4, DirectX 5, and in some instances, the Microsoft Plus pack. I generally avoid this version because Internet Explorer 4 is highly undesirable, and a few small details are removed from it, including this cool little Easter egg. (and other things people might want???) You can avoid its seemingly forced installation, but I don't even bother with it. Windows 95B is the ideal version of Windows 95, and I'll show you how to install the necessary updates to add native support for the P6 architecture the 440BX chipset uses.

This section assumes you will be installing Windows 95B with a startup floppy and a CD-ROM, which is the method most often used. CD-ROM drives are more prone to failure than any other component in an old computer, so you could also install Windows using DMF floppies, but that is a horrible method to use due to how long it takes and how much manual intervention it requires. Section (number) will show you better ways to install Windows without an optical drive.

Most Windows 95 CDs are not bootable, so you'll need to insert a Windows 95B startup disk that has a CD-ROM driver loaded. Refer to section (number) for information on how to create a startup disk for your needs. You should see a DOS prompt at this point. Assuming you're installing Windows 95 to a blank hard disk with no partitions, run FDISK.

If your hard disk is 1GB or larger, you'll be asked whether you want to enable FAT32 support or not. In the majority of cases, you'll want to use FAT32, but if you plan to access your files from a different installation of MS-DOS, Windows 95A, or NT4*, or you use programs which depend on FAT16, like Microsoft Laplink, you should disable this. To allow FDISK to create large FAT32 partitions, type Y for Yes, and press Enter.

*Windows NT 4.0 can be configured to support FAT32 partitions with some trickery

Select option 1 to create a partition, then option 1 again to create a primary partition. Wait for FDISK to finish analyzing the drive, then press Y to use all of the disk. Wait again for the program, and then it will tell you to restart the computer. Press the escape key, and press CTRL+ALT+DEL with the startup disk still in the drive. For a more comprehensive look at how to use FDISK, refer to section (number).

Back at the prompt, you will need to format your disk in order to write any data to it. To do this, type FORMAT C: and press Enter. Confirm that you want to format the partition; there's nothing on it at this point, anyway. The formatting may take a long time depending on the size of your partition, as well as how large and fast the disk is, and if it's connected to a non-standard controller or not. If you can't wait so long, a third-party partition manager may prepare your partition a lot faster. After the disk is done formatting, you may wish to give it a label.

Before running Setup, you may need to copy the cabinet files to the hard disk, as some versions of Windows 95 don't bother loading the default IDE CD-ROM driver in the second stage of Setup. The ideal location for these files is C:\WINDOWS\OPTIONS\CABS. You'll have to create each successive directory individually using the MD command. Once you've done that, copy all of the cabinets by typing COPY D:\WIN95\*.CAB C:\WINDOWS\OPTIONS\CABS, with D: being the letter of your drive.

You should be good to go now, so type D:\SETUP, optionally appending the /IS switch if you don't want to run ScanDisk. If all goes well, you should see a welcome box. Click Continue, and please accept the legally binding license agreement. At the Choose Directory screen, select "Other directory", click Next, and specify C:\WINDOWS as the target directory. Respond to the following warning with "Yes".

At this point, you'll be asked which type of installation you want for your system. You can select "Typical" for a bit of an easier cruise along, but I will select "Custom" to show you every little bit of Setup you can configure. Type your product key, then your name and organization. In the section "Analyzing Your Computer", you can tell Setup to look for a network adapter and sound card. If your hardware was manufactured after Windows 95B's release in mid 1996, you may not even want to try detecting these devices, and you definitely don't want to do it if at least one of them is crashing the system somehow. Given you have old ISA devices installed and you're confident they'll work, select the checkboxes for them and click Next.

Once hardware detection has completed, select the software components you wish to install. There's a bunch of them you can choose from, and what all you'll want to install will largely depend on what you expect to use. I'll start off by covering the components you'll most likely want.

Some of the most useful components within the Accessories category include the calculator, character map, document templates, Microsoft Paint, the System Monitor, the System Resource Meter, and WordPad. Given you're probably installing Windows 95 on a computer for the fun of it, you'll also want to take the desktop wallpapers, built-in games, fancy mouse pointers, Windows 95 tour, and ever-so-charming screen savers. You might also want the Online User's Guide, which is basically the instruction booklet in Windows Help format. The rest of the components are not too useful for casual desktop usage, so only select the ones you need. 300 kilobytes is a lot of space to save.

Accessibility options may be useful if you have trouble using a computer without them. (explain the various options)

Most communication components are geared towards dial-up modem users, so for everyone else, HyperTerminal is useful if you want to establish a serial console connection to some sort of UNIX box or debuggable device, while Direct Cable Connection allows you to connect to another Windows 9x machine through a null modem or LapLink parallel cable to transfer files. Direct Cable Connection requires the Dial-Up Networking component.

There's a few disk tools you can install. The drive compression utility, DriveSpace 3, cannot be used on FAT32 partitions, so it's only useful if you're using FAT16 partitions or you expect to work with compressed floppies. You probably won't use the Disk Defragmenter much, but it's nice to have around if you feel your disk is slowing down later on. The backup utility is very limited in Windows 95, as you can only back up to specific non-SCSI tape drives, floppy disk sets, a secondary hard disk, or a network share. Backups performed with this utility can be compressed by the program itself, but you might not want it anyway.

Don't bother installing Microsoft Fax if you don't plan to send faxes through your computer, and also ignore Windows Messaging unless you have a network of Windows 95 computers and you need to regularly communicate through an Exchange 95 mailbox. We all want such a setup, but you don't have one. Quit kidding yourself. The Microsoft Network is totally useless, as the service is no longer available for, well, any version of Windows.

As for Multimedia, you can select every component in the category, it's all fun stuff that you definitely want. You get four sound schemes, a selection of default sounds, several MIDI files, a volume control for the taskbar, and the ability to downsample audio files. (play CANYON.MID in the background?)

Once you've finished selecting the components you want, you'll be asked to configure your network adapters. If no networking components have been installed at this point, do not add a network adapter now. It works best to install one after Setup has completed. If the listed adapter doesn't look like it matches your card exactly, remove everything here. You may need to keep the Dial-Up Adapter if you're installing Direct Cable Connection.

Otherwise, review your network configuration and set a name for your computer. (or is that done later?) If you plan to log on to a Windows NT domain or a Novell NetWare server, review the properties for said clients. Remove whichever preinstalled client you don't plan to use. Remove any protocols you don't plan to use, and install the TCP/IP protocol if you expect to connect to the internet or other local systems which require this protocol.

Now, change options here as needed. The one thing you'll most likely want to change is the monitor setting; for the majority of desktops, you'll want to use a Plug and Play monitor. You should make sure APM is enabled, and the Windows 95 interface is selected. If you really want to, you can tell Windows 95 to load the Program Manager on startup. Sometimes, Setup will detect a display adapter from a certain vendor like S3.

If your video chipset is newer than Windows 95, as is the case with the S3 ViRGE, you may need to change this setting to Standard Display Adapter (VGA) if such a card displays corrupted output or locks up the system when trying to use a built-in driver. Otherwise, you can install your new display driver in Safe Mode if absolutely necessary; refer to section (number) for information about Safe Mode.

Do not create a startup disk here, as you're already using one. Click Next, and Setup will begin copying everything you've requested. Leave the startup disk in the drive until this process completes, as Setup likes to write temporary files to it, including a plain text setup log. (needs verification)

Setup should complete without interruption, assuming you're doing a clean install. Remove the startup disk and click Next to restart the computer. The second stage of Setup will begin, where it will configure more of your hardware and prepare your system for You may be requested to insert the setup CD. If it is already inserted, the driver for the CD-ROM may have not been loaded. This is why the cabinet files were copied to the hard disk ahead of time. Specify C:\WINDOWS\OPTIONS\CABS as the install path, and Setup will continue normally.

Windows will prepare the Explorer shell for use, and you may be prompted to select a time zone and install a printer. Ignore the printer setup wizard even if you have a printer connected to your computer, unless you know Windows 95 supplies a driver for it. Setup must restart your computer a second time.

Depending on your networking configuration, you may be prompted to enter a user name and password matching the credentials stored on a server you plan to connect to. If you haven't installed any networking components at this point, a login prompt will not appear at all, taking you straight to the desktop.

There are a few things you need to do before you begin installing drivers. Start off by opening REGEDIT from the Run prompt and navigating to the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup. Change the SourcePath string to "C:\WINDOWS\OPTIONS\CABS" so you don't have to insert the Windows 95 CD every time a program wants to install components which it supplies.

Next, install the first USB supplement, USBSUPP.EXE. It may be included in your Windows 95 CD-ROM under \OTHER\USB; otherwise, you can find it online. This package runs ScanDisk prior to updating your system, so don't do anything while this utility is running. Reboot your system. Another update to the USB supplement is USBUPD2.EXE, which must only be run after USBSUPP.EXE is installed and the system has rebooted. This package is not available on the Windows 95B CD, so you can either take it from a Windows 95C CD or download it from the internet. After installing this update, reboot your system again. I've gotten away with installing only the first USB update on 440BX systems, but the second one ensures greater stability on this platform.



17. Installing Windows NT Workstation 4.0

In spite of Windows NT 4.0 using the Windows 95 shell, it doesn't have a full-fledged device manager that automatically configures everything it can during Setup, so it requires a bit more focus in order to get everything working. This guide will explain the installation of the workstation version of Windows NT, which is intended for client computers and has limited server capabilities.

The Windows NT installation CD is bootable, so you should adjust the BIOS settings to ensure the CD-ROM boots first if you're using the onboard IDE controller. If you still can't boot from the CD, try loading the Smart Boot Manager from a floppy disk or use three boot floppies specifically programmed to load the text-based portion of Windows NT Setup. You can create boot floppies either by downloading the respective images online or running D:\I386\WINNT.EXE /(switch) from a DOS prompt. Replace D: with the letter of your CD-ROM drive. If you have a SCSI controller capable of booting CDs, make sure this function is enabled and then just insert the disc.

If it turns out you're unable to use the CD-ROM drive or you just don't want to even if you can, refer to section (number) for details on how to install Windows NT over the network in a quick and dirty implementation.

If you're using a SCSI controller that Windows NT doesn't have built-in drivers for, you must have a floppy disk ready which contains the drivers for your controller. Press F6 as soon as you see the screen turn blue. Press S and select "Other", then insert your driver disk. Select the listing that matches your controller, and continue with Setup.

Setup should see at least one hard drive connected to your controller. If it doesn't, you need to restart the program and try a different driver and/or check that your disks are connected properly. After scrolling through the end-user license agreement and promising not to overdraft copies of Windows NT by pressing F8, you can accept the computer settings Setup has detected here. One thing to mind here, if your computer is detected as an "MPS Uniprocessor PC", and you decide to install a second processor after completing Setup, Windows NT will outright fail to boot because it expects a different HAL to be loaded. Refer to section (number) for ways to change the HAL.

Now, you can configure partitions for each of your hard disks. Even if you have, say, an 18GB hard drive installed here, Setup will only be able to address 8GB at most. This is a design flaw of the setup utility, and you can't really do anything about it here. Furthermore, you can only create a boot partition as large as 4GB, but an alternate installation method explained in section (number) shows how you can create a boot partition as large as 7.8GB.

If you can't use up the rest of the disk's space from here, don't bother creating more partitions; I'll show you how to create a large secondary partition after Setup completes and some necessary updates are installed. Now, you'll need to format your new partition using either the FAT16 or NTFS file system. FAT16 partitions are limited to 2GB and are slower than NTFS partitions, as well as lacking in any real security features, so I recommend using the latter. You won't be able to access an NTFS partition from a DOS boot disk, so that's one thing to be mindful of. You could format a FAT16 boot partition for easy maintenance alongside a secondary NTFS partition that is to carry the rest of your data.

If you're installing Windows NT to a disk that has existing partitions which have already been formatted, you have additional options to work with - you can install Windows NT to a FAT16 partition without wiping it, and even convert it to an NTFS partition while leaving all files intact. (what about installing on existing NTFS partitions?) I recommend installing Windows NT to an empty partition or reformatting the partition after getting everything you want off of it backed up.

Specify the directory you wish to install the Windows NT files to; normally, it works best to use the default name. After advancing through the rest of the screens, Setup will begin copying some files. When that's done, remove any floppy disk you've inserted, and either remove the CD-ROM for now or change the boot order so the hard disk takes priority over the CD-ROM drive. The computer will restart and immediately continue Setup. If you specified the boot partition to be formatted as NTFS, it needs to perform a conversion and restart again.

Once Setup initializes, you'll need to select the type of installation you wish to use; the one you choose will determine which software components will be installed. Enter a name, and optionally an organization. As Windows NT is designed for use in corporate environments, you should definitely make up a serious-sounding company name here. Type in your CD key, which you can find either on the back of the installation CD's jewel case or the certificate of authenticity.

Now, enter a computer name unique to your network. Type a password for the administrator account, or leave it empty if you wish. Don't bother creating an emergency repair disk at this time. This will be done later when some essential updates have been applied and you've created all the partitions you need after Setup finishes.

From here, you can select a few components. There's some goodies in the Accessories category you might want, like some screen savers and wallpapers. The included games are useful for passing time as your other partitions take forever to format, and the multimedia components are nice to have if you have a sound card in your computer.

Windows NT Setup will begin the next stage, where you will configure the network settings. You can skip this if you want, perhaps you decided not to install a network card or you want to set up networking afterwards. Otherwise, have some driver floppies or a CD handy and specify that your computer will be wired to the network. Remote access is for modems that connect to a Windows NT server

18. Installing Windows 98 Second Edition



19. Troubleshooting Your Software

(some games have issues with Voodoo2 unless they are patched)
	
	IV.		ADVANCED PROCEDURES
	
20. Setting Up a Quick and Dirty PXE Server for Diskless OS Installations



20a. Installing MS-DOS Without a Floppy Disk



20b. Installing Windows 9x Without a Floppy or CD



20c. Installing Windows NT Without a CD



21. Setting Up File Sharing



22. Creating Startup Options and Hardware Profiles



23. Dual Booting



24. Taking Advantage of Symmetric Multiprocessing



25. Adding Support for Multiple Monitors



26. Overclocking the CPU and Video Card



27. Optional Software and Resources



28. Tips and Closing Comments



SECTIONS WHICH NEED ASSIGNMENT:

- Using FDISK

- Recovery Modes (Bypass Startup Files, Safe Mode, VGA Mode)

- Changing the Windows NT HAL After Installing a Second Processor

- Using a Non-VGA Adapter

LINKS:
Section 4
http://paralan.com/scsiexpert.html
http://paralan.com/sediff.html

Section 6
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CspDxq-LRME

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Section 4

If you're trying to find a SCSI hard drive, you have to be careful which one you buy, as there are three different types of SCSI signaling. If you're just getting started with SCSI, the one you'll want is low voltage differential SCSI, or LVD. This table shows a list of LVD controllers from Adaptec corresponding to the SCSI standard your drive may use. Any of these controllers are ideal for a 440BX build, and faster controllers are backwards compatible with slower drives and vice versa.
Most SCSI controllers from Adaptec use LVD signaling, so an Ultra, Ultra2, or Ultra160 controller from them is ideal for a 440BX build.
If you have an HVD device you want to use, you must obtain a SCSI controller capable of HVD signaling and keep it separate from all LVD and single-ended devices. The SYMBIOS SYM22802 is a good option for connecting HVD devices. Check the description for a couple of links pointing to articles detailing the types of SCSI signaling further.