I’ll start this off with this comment, just so you know that I know; I’m a geek!

That having been said, I am about to launch a third PC into my household, the other two being that of my sister’s and my own. The reasons to do that are to improve the ageing monster that my sister runs, a P4 2.4GHz HT with an Intel M/B, 512MB of RAM and a GeForce MX200, to a much better P4 D915 with 1GB RAM and a GeForce FX5600. The old parts will be put to the new PC which will serve as a NAS and download port.

The NAS will be a RAID5 configuration of 3 Samsung P120 250GB drives, along with a GigaLAN NIC (the other PCs already have GigaLAN). The RAID will be built and run by an XFX REVO64 3 port card for speed and, most importantly, hardware acceleration. This card handles all things raid and simply presents the system with just one drive. The system is oblivious that this drive is in effect a RAID5 array and thus no cycles are being wasted on the CPU to handle it. Also there is no need for a driver for the array, making the whole thing stable and fast, even on this old PC with its limited RAM. Not to mention that the Intel M/B doesn’t have raid features of its own…

The first step in every upgrade is making sure that nothing gets lost! That rings especially true since this is my sister’s PC and all hell would rain down on me if something went wrong!

So, the first thing I did was to go to the Device Manager and change all specialist motherboard drivers to a generic one. That will insure that after the m/b is changed the system will not lockup while the OS is trying to address missing devices. Even so, the first boot in the OS will be from Safe Mode.. but that is for later.

Also, the VGA driver was changed to a standard VGA for the same reason. Now all that is left is to make the new system… See you in a few!