Reader How Tos: A System To Convert VHS and 8 mm Tape To DVD

Loading The Software, Continued

9:40 PM - I installed Pioneer DVD software and drivers from the accompanying CD. The application program "RecordNow" by Veritas, included on the Pioneer CD, has a nice layout and is very intuitive to use. It allows you to record data or audio onto a CD or DVD recordable disc. The other application program included on the Pioneer CD was Drive Letter Assignment (DLA). After formatting a CD or DVD, DLA can assign a drive letter to the Pioneer DVD drive and make it appear as a normal read-write disk drive to the operating system. I don't know why or how I would want to use that, but it may come in handy, some day. I do have over 3 GB of digital images and 2 GB of music that I want to back up on something faster than tape. I believe a DVD disc would be the perfect place to store back up copies of these large collections.

9:55 PM - I installed the Microsoft IntelliMouse software and driver. I bought IntelliMouse because I really like the wheel between the left and right click buttons.

10:00 PM - The Gigabyte motherboard came with Intel Chipset software for the 850E chip, so I installed it. I have no idea what it does. There was no supporting literature to tell me what it does. On the same CD, there was also an Intel Application Accelerator, which I installed. Once again, I have no idea what that does, either.

10:15 PM - I re-booted the system and went searching for my two Maxtor drives. Using the Disk Manager (under Computer Management in Administrative Tools in the Control Panel), Windows 2000 did not recognize the two drives hooked to an ATA-133 interface. I went back into the BIOS and insured the interface was set to ATA on the Promise 20276 chip. It was. The Promise software signed on during boot up, searched for and registered both Maxtor drives. I entered the Promise driver by pressing CTRL-F during its search sequence and got a menu of configuration settings for the attached drives. I set it to configure these drives as two separate ATA devices. I then allowed the system to continue to boot.

11:15 PM - Now in Windows, I used Add/ Remove Hardware in the Control Panel to load the Promise driver software. Once that was loaded, I re-booted the system and re-entered the Disk Manager. I now had another drive. Windows 2000 wanted to know what kind of volume the new device was going to be: simple, spanned, striped or system. I set it to simple. I elected to assign drive letter E: to the entire device as a single partition. Windows 2000 informed me that the new drive E: had 152 GB of unallocated space.

11:30 PM - I started formatting drive E: with FAT32 but saw no indications of any activity other than the drive LED was on. I shut the system down and went to bed.

Sunday August 4, 2002

1:40 PM - I started the system from a cold boot. The boot time to logon window was 55 seconds.

1:45 PM - I installed Acrobat 5.0 from the Gigabyte motherboard utilities CD because I have so many PDF files.

1:55 PM - I installed the Direct 8.1 driver from the Gigabyte motherboard utilities CD. I believe the Direct 8.1 driver is used primarily by games.