Main  DIY Computer  Site Map  Email:  Webmaster Installing Windows 2000 Professional Installing Windows 2000 is very time consuming. Depending on the speed of your computer and CD drive, it can take anywhere from 1 hour to 2 hours. In addition, you may not get it installed properly the first time. So, be patient. If you are installing Windows 2000 as the only operating system on the computer, boot off of the CD, and then have it format the hard drive. If you want to have both Windows 98 and Windows 2000 installed on your machine and are ok with just using the NT boot manager, partition the hard drive (i just use fdisk), then install Windows 98 on the primary partition, and then install Windows 2000 onto one of the other partitions. If you follow this procedure, then when you boot up the computer, you will see a menu (with options that are specified in the boot.ini file in the root of the primary partition) where you will be asked whether you want to boot into Windows (Win98) or whether you want to boot into Windows 2000 Professional. There are not many options to choose from during the installation. The setup program pretty much does everything. The one thing that you will have to choose is whether you want to format the drive using NTFS or FAT32. NTFS is more secure and more efficient. If this is a computer that you will be using at home, and are not afraid of anyone gaining access to your machine, use FAT32, because it will give you less problems in the long run. If you choose to use NTFS, you may have to specify permissions. If you're not sure what to do, choose FAT32. After installing Windows 2000, immediately go to Microsoft's website and download the latest service pack. This is very important. After installing this, you will need to reboot. I usually then download and install the high encryption pack. After you install the service pack, then you are ready to upgrade/install the device drivers. Download the latest drivers for your hardware from the manufacturer's website. If your hardware came with a driver CD, the driver on that CD is probably much older than the ones currently available. Then install the device drivers one at a time. After installing a driver, reboot the computer and make sure that it is operating properly. Then install the next one. Very occasionally, a device driver will ruin the Windows installation. And if you install 5 device drivers and then reboot, and you find out that one of them has caused your machine to stop functioning properly, then you will have to format your drive and start all over again. And you won't know which driver caused the problems. Most manufacturers provide a couple of different versions of their drivers for download. If you have problems with the newest version, try the second newest version, etc. Video cards are very bandwidth intensive. If you have two video cards, make sure that one of them is an AGP card, and the other is a PCI card. If both are high performance PCI video cards, you may have bandwidth starvation issues. It is common when installing multiple video cards to have to try different driver versions until the two video cards stop conflicting. After you get all of the device drivers installed and have tested that your machine is operating properly, burn a copy of those drivers to CD, or at least copy them to a zip disk. At a later date, you may have to reinstall your machine, and at least now, you will have a copy of a set of drivers that worked properly with each other at one time. This will make reinstallation much faster. Back   Index    Next Sections Introduction Selecting the Components Mounting the Motherboard Mounting the CPU Installing the RAM Case Connections Mounting the Floppy Drive Mounting Drives Installing Cards External Connections POST Screen BIOS Setup Windows 2000 Biorobots Home  Site Map      Server Project Main      FAQ      How To      New Account Copyright 2006 Case Western Reserve University, Dept. of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. All rights reserved.