Bus speed confusion

[Guest]

Hello,
I have just assembled a computer on the cheap, and am a bit confused. Set up at the moment is:
900 MHz Thunderbird
Gigabyte GA71xe4
128mb and a Creative TNT2 Ultra 32Mb.
Lg 52x cd and WD 30gb7200 hd.
On the board there are settings to change the bus speed (I think), the default is 100MHz. Does anybody know if I need to change this, as the system often hangs and is generally a bit dodgy? Also I think my cd is too fast to install win98.I have tried and failed many times.Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[rbertino]

100 MHz bus speed sounds right to me. As far as it not being able to install Windows, well that's another story...

I'm assuming that you probably have more stuff in your setup than you mention (such as a sound card, maybe a NIC, etc.) Don't know if you tried this already, but remove everything but the Video Card, Hard Drive & CD-ROM (and the memory and processor of course). Then try installing Windows 98. It could be that you have two conflicting devices in your system that are keeping it from installing Windows.

<i>I don't know anything about computers... but I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night...</i> :lol:

 

[Guest]

Thanks, I'll leave the bus speed alone then. I haven't put the sound or modem in yet though, so I can't think what the problem is.Windows just gives me a load of cab file errors during setup.

 

[Crashman]

It could be your "fast" CD-ROM. Certain "high-speed" CD-ROMs take so long to "spin up" that Win98 gives up on finding the file and give you an error. BTC CD-ROMs are notorious for this!

Cast not thine pearls before the swine

 

[Guest]

Thanks, I'll try borrowing a "slower" one then!

 

[Crashman]

Most of the better names have reasonable access times, like Teac, Sony, Toshiba, Panasonic, Hitachi, Ricoh, Plextor, and even Light-On (usualy). I have had mixed luck with Sanyo. No luck with BTC. Never tried Delta or Cyberdrive.

Cast not thine pearls before the swine

 

[Nightowl]

May want to check the BIOS for anti-virus protection at the MOBO level. If there and on by default--could interfer with install of OS. I had problems with install of earlier version of Windows when I had virus protection enabled in the BIOS.

 

[RCPilot]

Check the PSU. If it's to low on wattage for the system the HDD won't spool up fast enough for the CPU to recognize it. Then your CD ROM might not be able to feed the HDD properly because it wasn't recognized.

Don't laugh it happened to me. I had a 250 PSU & thought I'd try to use it on my T-bird. I thought that if it wasn't big enough, nothing or something wouldn't start. That was not the case. The HDD just wouldn't spool fast enough, I couldn't get a clean install on anything. Changed the PSU to 300 watts & she's been running fine ever since. Hope that it helps you.

Skinny

How do you eat a elephant? One bit at a time!