Building an Engineering Workstation > Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Two Month Report
I've now been using my new system for about two months now. Overall, the system is running very well, and I haven't had any significant problems (not even any minor problems, for that matter). But I have done a few upgrades worth mentioning.
Motherboard Problems Revisited
When I last wrote about this system, I had shipped the motherboard back to the distributor under an RMA. Briefly, I thought a DIMM slot was bad because inserting more than one DIMM made the system unstable.
I received the new motherboard about a week after I sent the old one out. I installed the CPU, DIMMs, and cards with the board on a rubber mat (allowing greater insertion force), then installed the board in the system.
As you might imagine, I was quite annoyed when I turned the power on and ran into the same problems as with the first board.
I thought it was too much of a coincidence to have the same problem on two different boards. This time, I borrowed some newer DIMMs from another machine and installed them in all four slots. Now the machine worked without any problems.
It looks like my RAM is not really PC-100 compliant. I'm working on exchanging it for better modules, but in the meantime I've found a combination of two DIMMs that work. That gives me 128 MB of RAM, which should be adequate for a while.
Windows 2000 Installation
I was itching to use my new USB ports, so I installed Windows 2000 (W2K) almost as soon as it was available. I installed over NT 4.0 SP 6a, choosing to upgrade the system rather than perform a clean installation. The only software I had installed at this point, aside from hardware drivers, was Office 2000 and Acrobat 4 (the full version, not just the reader).
The installation was completely uneventful. I loaded the CD, followed the instructions, and about a half hour later I was running W2K. The only trick was first downloading the Highpoint UDMA/66 drivers onto a floppy and specifying them as the mass storage device.
At first glance, the W2K interface is identical to the Windows 95/98 or NT 4.0 interface. But after working with the new OS for a couple of weeks, many improvements become obvious. In fact, I'm finding it more and more difficult to go back to the older systems.
The first and most obvious difference is that Plug 'n Play (PnP) really works. I've inserted a new graphics card and plugged a printer into the parallel port. Both items worked without any intervention on my part.
Dual Monitors
Another major reason for upgrading to W2K is dual monitor support. You can install multiple video cards, and Windows will use all of them.
The trick is finding a secondary card whose drivers support multiple monitors. The Multi-Monitors Resource site has an official Microsoft list of compatible cards, plus a user-contributed database. It also has instructions for installing the secondary card and setting up the system.
I had a spare ATI Mach32 card, but unfortunately it's not supported as a secondary card. I ended up trading it to someone for a Stealth 3D 2000 (S3 Virge chipset).
The Stealth card is not on the official Microsoft list, but it is in the Multi-Monitors database. To get it to work as a secondary card, I set the BIOS to boot from it first (by selecting PCI over AGP), then set my Oxygen AGP card as the primary in the Display control panel.
(I did try this with the Mach32 card, but it didn't work.)
When the system boots up, the BIOS messages appear on the secondary monitor, as does the initial Windows startup screen (the one that always appears in VGA mode). When W2K switches to graphics mode and shows the login prompt, the display switches to the primary monitor. All subsequent windows appear on that monitor, but can be dragged to the secondary monitor.
I've just started using the dual monitors, but already it's a feature I can't do without. It's great to run a program on one monitor and view its help file on the other, or browse a Web site on one and add it to my database on the other.