Preparing Your Hardware for Windows XP
| The amount of hardware upgrading you might need to make to prepare your system for Windows XP Professional depends in great measure on how close your system is to the minimum hardware requirements discussed earlier in the chapter. Because Windows XP's user-friendly multimedia and system protection features demand more computer power than previous versions of Windows, a system which barely exceeds the minimum hardware requirements for CPU, memory, video, and hard disk space can make running Windows XP an ordeal instead of a pleasure. I've had slow machines with small hard drives and fast machines with large hard drives; faster and larger is better, both for you and for Windows XP. The Motherboard and CPUSo, you want a general upgrade to the performance of your system? The cheapest upgrade you can make is probably to add more RAM (see below). But if your wallet allows, and you want to get to the core of your system for a serious upgrade, start with the motherboard. Don't bother upgrading just your CPU without upgrading the motherboard too. While CPU upgrade kits are available to allow some older systems to use newer processors, recent changes in CPU speeds, physical packaging, and electrical requirements mean you're much better off upgrading both the motherboard and the CPU if you need a speed boost. Even if you're considering a RAM upgrade, do the motherboard/CPU upgrade first because a new motherboard often uses a better, faster type of RAM than your current system does. Motherboard improvements roll down the pike every few months, and adding a new CPU to an old design isn't going to net you much. Motherboards are pretty cheaptypically around $100$150 even for a good one, such as an Intel, Supermicro, Abit, or ASUS (this price is sans CPU); figure anywhere from $75 to $200 bucks more for the CPU, depending upon how close to the "bleeding edge" you want to go). Don't get a motherboard from a company that doesn't put its name on the board, doesn't have a good Web site for technical support, or doesn't have a phone number. It's not worth saving a few bucks. Also, check the Microsoft Catalog, of course, to see whether it's been tested. (Look under "Other Hardware" on the catalog page.) Get a board with the latest system memory and a chipset that was designed to make it work optimally with the CPU you selected. (See the next section to learn about the importance of chipsets.) Obviously, you'll want a modern motherboard with a snappy CPU. So, get your hands on a motherboard that supports the ACPI power management scheme (not just APM) and a reasonably quick processor (in the 1GHz to 3GHz range), such as an Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon 64 (or the older Athlon XP). If performance is your game, check out the hyper-threading Intel Pentiums. (This technology makes it possible for a single CPU to process information similar to how a dual processor system does.) It should have a fast internal bus (called the "front-side bus" or FSB), support for ATA-100 hard drives (or better, serial ATA drives) and AGP or PCI express graphics, a flashable (upgradable) BIOS for later upgrading, and it should be designed around the processor you have in mind. In fact, it should come with the CPU installed. Installing a CPU isn't that difficult, but if you don't do it right, the CPU can overheat and croak. This goes without saying for anyone who has built a PC recently, but virtually all new motherboards are of the "ATX" format (though a few newer form factors are available, notably microBTX). These motherboards don't fit in the older AT-style cases and don't work with the AT power supplies either. ATX power supplies work hand-in-hand with the ACPI chipset and operating system, allowing the software to control the power states of the PC, including sleep, suspend, soft power down and up, and so on. There are some AT-style boards available still, but I suggest getting a new case and power supply and opting for the ATX version of whatever motherboard you're considering. A new case and power supply shouldn't cost you more than about $60 (though better cases/power supply combos can cost upwards of $100). When you install Windows XP on an ACPI-based system, you might need to update the ACPI BIOS to get the full benefits of Plug and Play and power management. If you don't do the update, you might have any of the following problems:
To obtain an update that should prevent these problems, contact your computer's manufacturer. Actually it's a good idea to contact the manufacturer (or check their Web site) even before you install XP. If you can get the latest BIOS update, the XP installation will go more smoothly and the ACPI features such as power management are more likely to work properly once XP is installed. BIOS upgrades are available for many laptops as well as for desktop computers. CAUTION Now listen up. This one is really important. Be aware that installing an incorrect BIOS update may cause serious damage to your computer system. It's mandatory that you obtain the correct version of BIOS for your motherboard model from the manufacturer. Computer manufacturers may offer several different BIOS versions for different models. Do not download a version of BIOS that is not specified for your specific motherboard model. Installing an incorrect BIOS update may cause serious damage to your computer system. Contact your computer or motherboard manufacturer to ensure you have the most current BIOS version. TIP Many motherboard manufacturers provide an easy way to download a BIOS upgrade and install it via their Web pages. Also, on some motherboards, you have to enable BIOS upgrading by changing a jumper setting. I suggest that you disable the jumper when you're not upgrading to prevent viruses or some runaway program from messing with your BIOS settings. Check the Web site www.motherboards.org for in-depth information about the latest motherboards, chipsets, types of RAM, 64-bit CPU, dual CPUs, and much more. You can even find information on building your own computer. It's a pretty amazing site. Also, most of the time, only a 10% to 50% performance increase could be achieved with a second CPU. Unless you do a great deal of graphic design (3D Studio Max, Lightwave, Adobe Photoshop, and so forth) and/or if you continuously have many CPU-taxing applications running simultaneously, it won't net you much speed gain. If you really want to delve into the research, check the Usenet newsgroups. Point your newsreader to alt.comp.periphs.mainboard TIP You can find many other motherboard groups as well, addressing specific brands, but this is the place to start. You'll have your reading cut out for you. If you prefer to use a Web browser to search newsgroups, send your browser to groups.google.com. If you're going to be running applications that can actually benefit from multiple processors (check with the software vendor because not all applications do), then you should consider going full bore with a dual-processor motherboard. Although Intel's processors were the only players in this game until mid-2001, AMD's Athlon MP now provides you with a cost-effective choice. NOTE Only XP Professional will run with dual CPUs, incidentally. XP Home will not. Check with the maker of a dual-CPU motherboard to ensure it will run with XP, if in doubt. Also, if you want to run with the new Intel Itanium processor, you need a special 64-bit Itanium version of XP Professional. Suffice it to say that older systems based on 386, 486, and early Pentium processors are now out of the picture. If you want to keep these machines in service, put less-demanding versions of Windows on them, and network them as clients into your Windows XP or 2000 LAN. The Importance of the ChipsetKeep in mind that the CPU is only a very small part of the overall design of a motherboard and computer. Many people ask me about upgrading their computers by simply dropping in a (relatively) expensive CPU chip or going through all kinds of machinations to speed-double the chip, and so forth. Just like you don't become (Governor!) Arnold Schwarzenegger or Rambo by getting a brain transplant (you need the body, too), you can't create a supercomputer just by upgrading the CPU. Efficiency of the CPU is interdependent with several variables, such as the support chipset and the internal system bus speed. In fact, contrary to popular belief, the efficiency of the computer is more affected by the chipset than by any other factornot the CPU nor the video nor the hard disk. The CPU can be changed. The memory can be upgraded. The hard disk can be swapped. But the motherboard has been designed around the capabilities of the chipset, and until you change the motherboard, your PC will function largely the same. You cannot upgrade the chipset on a motherboard; you have to replace the board. Desirable chipsets support the following features:
You can see that the chipset is at the very heart of much of what the computer does. Because it cannot be upgraded, though, there isn't much talk about it, and people tend to forget about its centrality. Equally important to the overall design of the chipset is how well the CPU and chipset engineers communicated during the design of the chipset. Doing your homework on the latest chipsets and their compatibility/performance with specific CPUs will serve you well. SlotsWhen you're scoping out a motherboard, think about how many slots you will need for plug-in boards (which can include cards for your sound, video, modem, and so on). More and more hardware is built onto the main boards now because very large-scale integration chips (VLSI) make it possible; therefore, you'll tend to need fewer slots than in the past. Often network support, audio, and even AGP video are built into the motherboard. If you want to use your own sound card and special super-duper video adapter, you can save a few bucks by getting the "bare-bones" version of a motherboard that does not include sound or video on it. However, if you want to avoid the hassle and keep more slots available for your other boards, buy the motherboard with this stuff integrated on it (such as on-board audio, which provides lower-costand lower-performanceaudio capability that should suit your needs, unless you need high-end workstation performance, performing video capture or editing sound files). For one thing, all the parts are guaranteed to work together. If you think you'll want to add your own boards for the motherboard-included functions, make sure you can turn them off (usually with jumpers or software settings in the BIOS). As of this writing, most motherboards were strong in PCI slots and have phased out ISA slots. Few have even one ISA slot these days. And most motherboards now have either an AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) slot or a PCI Express slot for plugging in a fast video card. AGP is based on the PCI bus but fine-tuned for the needs of high-performance 3D graphics. RAMLike other versions of Windows NT, Windows XP Pro uses the memory it finds in the system intelligently. And it loves memory! The cheapest and easiest upgrade you can make to your PC is to add RAM. If your computer seems to "hit the hard disk" (that is, you have a delay in activity and you hear some clickity-click sounds in the computer and see the disk access light on the front of your system flash annoyingly) every time you click something or move the mouse around, Windows is doing way too much disk swapping (accessing data from your hard drive rather than system memory). You should be able to quickly switch among 5 to 10 programs without a lot of wait or noise from your PC. Go get some new memory that matches the kind of board you have (read the motherboard or your PC's manual), and carefully install the memory. Unplug the computer. Open the case, and find the RAM slots. Touch the metal case with your other hand before inserting the RAM. (RAM chips are very susceptible to damage by static electricity.) Get the fastest kind of memory that your motherboard can take advantage of. Modern motherboards automatically detect memory you install (no switch setting is necessary), and Windows XP reads this setting and uses it as necessary. In general, the more memory you have installed, the better. As mentioned earlier, Microsoft suggests 128MB for decent system performance. If you're running lots and lots of programs at once, I suggest more on the order of 256MB to 1GB. For the record, I've found 128MB adequate for even running 10 or more programs, while many folder windows were open, along with a couple of browser windows. I'm writing this chapter on a PIII 1GHz laptop with 128MB, and it's plenty zippy. I typically have more than 10 programs and/or windows open, playing MP3 files, checking email in the background, and browsing the Web. Another machine of mine has 1.5GB RAM and does a whole lot less disk swapping. At this point, generic mid-performance memory is so inexpensive that there is no reason not to upgrade if you need to. The high-end stuff (fastest RAM) will cost you a bit more, however.
Hard DiskYou need approximately 1.5GB of free hard disk space just to install Windows XP. This amount is just a little indication of Windows XP's storage hunger. With bloatware on the rise (programmers figure why bother making programs fast and tight with storage being so cheap, I guess), it behooves you to have lots of storage space. Like upgrading RAM, upgrading the hard disk is easy these dayseven on the pocket book. Get down to Costco, or check www.buy.com for the latest prices on hard disks. They continue to plummet. For less than a hundred dollars, you can get a huge disk. I hesitate to even quote sizes. It seems that every year sees an increase of a factor of ten in storage capacity. In any case, the 1.5GB you need for the installation will look like nothing. As with RAM, modern motherboards autodetect and configure hard disks when you insert them. Installing the current crop of ATA drives has become very easy. The biggest nuisances with drive upgrades are figuring out whether to ditch the old one or keep it, deciding which drive will be the boot drive, and figuring out how to back up and restore. The EIDE spec allows for four drives, one of which is probably your CD-ROM. That typically leaves room for three, unless you have a CD-RW or another type of removable-media drive (such as a Zip or SuperDisk drive) in the box. There are too many options to cover here, but the easiest upgrade path is to make the new drive a "slave" on the primary IDE channel. Make sure to set jumpers on the drives' circuit as necessary, and ensure that you have the necessary cables to hook up the drives. Jumper your boot drive as master and the secondary drive as slave. A newer type of ATA drive, called Serial ATA, uses smaller, simpler-to-connect cables and transfers data much faster than ATA or UltraATA drives. The cables on normal (parallel) ATA drives are bulky, inflexible, fragile, and too short. This caused hard disks and optical drives to be placed in strange positions and resulted in many frustrated system builders. The width of those cables also blocked airflow within the computer's box, and with modern CPUs and video cards generating so much heat, good airflow is essential to a stable system. Serial ATA (S-ATA as opposed to P-ATA) drives also can transfer data at a slightly faster rate than typical P-ATA drives. First generation S-ATA drives run at a bandwidth of 150MB/second. This is a seemingly disappointing 13% improvement over the popular P-ATA standard called Ultra/ATA 133 (133MB/second). However, today's hard drives rarely ever use that much bandwidth, so 150MB/s is more than enough. In later incarnations, S-ATA will run even faster.
TIP If you have no more 3.5-inch drive bays for your hard disk, but you have an empty 5.25-inch drive bay (the drive bay size used by CD-ROM drives), use the adapter kit packaged with some retail-boxed drives, or purchase a separate kit from a computer store. The kit has spacers and screws to allow your small drive to fit into the larger bay. Unlike NT, Windows XP can be installed on large removable media. The Setup program doesn't look to determine whether the target volume is removable. The %SystemRoot% (WINNT) folder is typically on a fixed hard disk, but it could be on a removable disk. One advantage of this option would be to install, say, Linux on one removable drive, Windows NT 4 on another, Windows 98 on a third, and so on.
NOTE Some computer jocks building high-performance systems such as big servers use SCSI drives. These require a special SCSI controller card. Note that even with Ultra2/Wide SCSI and a high-spindle-speed (10,000 RPM) drive, you'll only get 80MB/sec transfer ratesslower than today's fastest parallel ATA drives. (The older Fast-Wide SCSI and Ultra-SCSI are only 20MB/sec.) So the advantages of SCSI over ATA are a thing of the past, especially with serial ATA drives available. If what you're after is performance for, say, non-linear video editing workstations, or high-speed servers, I'd opt for multiple ATA/100 drives connected via a RAID 0 arrangement. Some motherboards, such as those from Abit, offer an on-board RAID controller that lets you gang up two ATA/100 drives to work in tandem, essentially doubling your hard drive data transfer rate. Promise (http://www.promise.com) makes a plug-in board called the FastTrak 100 TX Pro that allows RAID arrangement using up to four additional drives to your computer. Monitor/Video Card SupportBecause a doggy, older video card can bring even a snappy system to a crawl when you scroll the screen or move a window around, you'll want to find yourself a fast AGP card if your motherboard has an AGP slot. Microsoft has made the move to support video quite nicely in Windows XP Professional. You have the option of connecting up to ten monitors, for example, and using them together. You should check your video cards' specs and the Windows Catalog site to see whether they will work in multimonitor arrangements before purchasing, though. Generally speaking, most popular Super VGAcompatible video cards will work with Windows XP, but if you're thinking about upgrading for more speed or features, research what's up with the latest AGP boards that have the bells and whistles you wantTV out, video capture, a fast 3D chipset for games, whatever; any recent motherboard which doesn't have on-board video will have an AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) slot. Decide the resolution you want to use, and make sure the card supports the number of colors you'll need at that resolution; if you choose a video card with at least 16MB of RAM, you can handle resolutions up to 1,600x1,280 with 24-bit (16.8 million) color. If you have a 17-inch CRT or 15-inch LCD monitor, you'll want to be running at 1024x768 resolution. Make sure the board can run at 72Hz refresh rate at the color depth and resolution you desire, too, so you won't see flicker on your CRT screen (LCD monitors don't require a high refresh rate). P.S. Your monitor needs to be able to do it, too. Check the monitor specs. Some older monitors can't run at, say, 1024x768 while refreshing at 72Hz. The speed of AGP boards (and connectors on the motherboard) is ever increasing. As of this writing, the fastest AGP hardware ran at "AGP 8X" speed, which means eight times faster than the speed of original AGP boards introduced in 1996. Keep in mind that your motherboard and video card have to support the same speed (4X,8X, etc.) to gain the benefits of a fast card. PCI Express is an emerging standard that promises to replace both standard PCI slots and the AGP slot over the next few years. If you're looking for a new monitor for use with Windows XP, keep in mind that 15-inch LCD panels have about the same usable screen space as 17-inch conventional monitors (CRT), a 17-inch LCD is equivalent to a 19-inch CRT, and so on. TIP Many users who are in the market for a new monitor are buying LCD panels instead of conventional glass-tube CRTs. If you're shopping for a new monitor, keep these differences between LCD and CRT monitors in mind. Laptop and other flat-panel screens look very good at only one resolutionthe so-called "native resolution." Other resolutions can be displayed, but they tend to look blocky. Some LCDs look better than others in nonnative resolutions due to built-in antialiasing firmware. If you plan to switch resolutions (as with DOS-based graphics software or for previewing Web pages you're building), check the quality of the LCD panel at different resolutions. And, unlike standard CRT monitors, LCD monitors look best at low refresh rates. If you buy an LCD monitor, be sure to set the refresh rate to 60Hz. It will probably look clearer that way. You don't have to worry about flicker on an LCD monitor; it's not an issue, and any advertising about high refresh capabilities of an LCD monitor is bogus and misleading. The pixels are transistors and simply don't flicker because they don't have to be refreshed in order to stay on. You'll still pay 23 times more for an LCD panel than for a CRT, but if you're crowded for space on your desk, they're great. Windows XP comes with a large complement of 32-bit driver support for many devices, including a wide variety of video cards. It's quite likely that your card is going to be recognized, but you should check with the online Windows Catalog just to make sure, as mentioned earlier in this chapter. Plug and Play ItemsPlug and Play (or PnP, as it is commonly abbreviated) has brought a new level of sophistication to the PC. Much of the headache of PC upgrades stemmed from internal conflicts between plug-in boards and peripheral devices that were not easily detected by the operating system and too difficult for users to configure. Installing even a simple modem was often an exercise in failure for many users as they struggled to determine and set the board's jumpers, dip switches, or software settings to use an available IRQ (Interrupt Request). With PnP, you just plug in a board, screen, printer, scanner, or other peripheral, and reboot. PnP doesn't always work as advertised, but most of the time it does, and it's a big step in the right direction. NT-based platforms began supporting PnP with Windows 2000. Now with XP, PnP installations are easier than ever. If XP can't find a driver when you install a device, the Windows Update site will be queried. There are currently thousands of drivers on the Windows update site. Chances are good the system will automatically find a driver for you somewhere. NOTE The pivotal question to ask when wondering whether your hardware is XP-compatible is whether the manufacturer or Microsoft supplies a Windows 2000 driver for it. Windows 2000 and XP rely on what is called the Windows Driver Model (WDM). (In addition to WDM, Windows 98 also supported older 16-bit drivers, but Windows 2000 and Windows XP don't.) As mentioned earlier in this chapter, the bottom line is that if there is a Windows 2000 driver for a piece of your hardware, it will probably work okay in XP. In cases where a driver won't work with XP, rather than causing a system crash, XP utilizes a trick called "defective driver blocking" (DDB). DDB prevents problem drivers from ruining a user's system. When an acceptable driver for a detected hardware device can't be found, you'll see a window that lets you offer feedback to Microsoft, such as "Hey, the driver for my _____ didn't work." If and when a driver for that device is developed, an AutoUpdate notification will pop up and offer it to you. If by fluke a bad driver is actually loaded, it shouldn't cause your system not to boot. Instead, the system should boot into "Safe Mode," and use System Restore or otherwise remove the driver so that the system will boot normally. For more information about Safe Mode, see Chapter 33, "Troubleshooting and Repairing Windows XP." For more information about removing devices and drivers, see Chapter 30, "Installing and Replacing Hardware." TIP To be permitted to display the "Windows 2000-compatible," "Windows Me compatible," or "Windows XP compatible" logo, hardware and software must be PnP-capable. Look for this logo or the Plug and Play moniker when buying.
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If you cant seem to get your newly installed RAM to be detected, 