Legit Reviews

so i boot to the cd drive (dvd) and i'm trying to install windows xp pro on a PIII machine and as soon as you hit "click any button to boot from cd" it then flashes a screen saying "setup will now check your system configuration"

and nothing happens. i figured it needed to do its thing, so i let it go for about 30 minutes and the screen stayed blank, and the dvd rom light didnt blink either.

now there's an install of fedora 7 on this machine, could that be the issue? cause i thought the windows installer would over-write it....

as for the machine, its an ECS board (i'll get the model number when i have it handy) and an old XFX card, with a 1.0Ghz PIII processor... help?

Make sure your HDD & DVD-rom are jumpered correctly!
I've had that happen to me before on older Mobo's.

Drive may also have to be Formatted & partitioned before winxp will install.
Another thought, is the version of XP you have a full version or upgrade?

hmm i installed fedora using the same process, so i think its connected properly... i think i might just wipe the pc and try again

well, when u use an install CD, it asks you if you want to format, and what partition you want to use, so it doesnt sound like a drive issue, i have installed xp pro sp2 on a PIII 600MHz CPU so yours should be plenty fast enough to handle it, how much RAM do you have in it? OS installs take reeaal long if you dont have much

512 i believe, whats weird is that it doesnt do that, it just says its gonna check the system configuration then the screen goes blank.... hmmm it had windows 95 on it before i wiped it for fedora, maybe the motherboard isnt compatible with XP... i'll check that out as soon as i get home in a few mintues

stopthekilling77 wrote:512 i believe...

then its definately not that, you dont have it overclocked at all do you? it might be getting too hot, or mabie the install CD doesnt work, but thats about all i can come up with

(i had XP PRO SP2 running with 96 MB of RAM, 600 MHz CPU witha FSB of 100, it didnt like it to much, but it still worked)

we're golden! i slicked the disks with Derek's Boot & Nuke (DBaN) and XP installed quite smoothly.

next thing: overclock the PC!

it's a Pentium III, rather
here's a cpu-z shot of the specs. now how'd i go about overclocking this guy?

Bear in mind that its not going to clock anywhere near as good as current day chips. 200Mhz would be good going!

The overclocking is done still by raising the FSB. So check your BIOS options, or failing that try something like clockgen and see if it supports the motherboards PLL chip.

Dan

most PIIIs i know of have locked FSBs but you can change the multiplier(mabie urs can, i dont know)

clockgen?

okay read up on it, and it shows no PLL support, so i guess i'm SoL on that...

i've got shots of my bios menu, i'm not seeing anything explicitly letting me change settings...

180nm, that's huge!

yeah its gigantic lol