New Computer

I’ve spent the past month building a new desktop computer.

It is something I’ve meant to do for the past year and half and just hadn’t had the time or patience to dedicate to it. I had built my previous machine, a Pentium 4 2.6GHz on a ASUS P4C800E Deluxe board in December 2003. It was my first real build and was a good machine however with advances and demands on resources with Photoshop etc it was becoming a bit frustrating to work with on a daily basis. Right after Thanksgiving NewEgg had a great deal the on the case I had been eyeing so I bought that (Antec Nine Hundred) and an Antec PSU and the end of December I started putting together the rest of the parts list…

I ended up with:

ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 Board
i7 Core 920
EVGA 980GTX Video Card
Corsair Dominator 8GB DDR3
WD 150 VelociRaptor for the OS
WD 750 Caviar Black for data
Rosewill 3.5 Floppy and Card Reader
Sony Optiarc Black DVD/RW
An additional 120mm fan to put on the side door..
Windows 7 64bit for the Operating System

I messed up on the memory as it is a Quad kit and the board is triple channel… didn’t realized that until after the fact and everything still works so I’m not going about changing it.

Parts arrived on January 12th. The build went smoothly and spent a day crunching on the MS extended memory tests with no errors. The only surprises were the new ‘triple channel’ thing on the memory and the fact that my 2001 HP scanner (5300C) is not supported in anyway by Windows 7 or HP. HP’s site pretty much says the scanner is too old buy a new one… so I did… I bought a Canan LiDE 700F which I’m quite happy with.

For the most part Windows Drivers have been good. Couple exceptions…

Wacom Tablet – do not under any circumstances install the Wacom Mouse Controller from Windows Update. It causes the tablet to work as a mouse and when you install Wacoms Drivers over it causes the tablet to simply NOT work at all! I had to uninstall all drivers for it. Unplug the Wacom. Install the Wacom Drivers. Restart. Replug in the Tablet. Restart. And finally my tablet works properly!

Soundcard drivers. Ok the Windows Drivers are ok… but didn’t have nice control for line in etc. Downloading the SoundMax drivers from ASUS’ site corrected the issue with Line In however, I noticed there was no “What You Hear” or “Stereo Mix” option. Searching around I found the solution.

Edit SoundMax Drivers from ASUS (Search ADIHdAud.inf for Stereo Mix and enable ’00’ all disabled  ’01’ items) By default, the driver instructions have the Stereo Mix option set to disabled. You can read more about this at:

<http://digitalbreed.com/2007/enabling-stereomix-with-soundmax-drivers>

Uninstall all current drivers and before restrating, disable Windows 7 from auto loading drivers. To do this, use gpedit.msc navigate to:

Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Device Installation.

Restrictions folder > Prevent Installation of Devices not described by other policy settings > set it to ENABLEDÂ

You can read more about this at:

<http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/how-to-disable-automatic-driver-installation-in-windows-vista/>

Reboot watch Windows not be able to install its default drivers. Reset the above setting to UNCONFIGURED and finally load the edited drivers from ASUS. And now Stereo Mix is listed as a Recording Device and is usable!

A few other QUARKS I found in Windows 7…

Outlook 2007 can not preview PDFs

The fix involves editing the registry.

Find the key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ Wow6432Node\Classes\CLSID\

{DC6EFB56-9CFA-464D-8880-44885D7DC193}

Find the AppID value

Change the AppID value from {6d2b5079-2f0b-48dd-ab7f-97cec514d30b} to the correct setting {534A1E02-D58F-44f0-B58B-36CBED287C7C}

You can read more about this at:

<http://news.office-watch.com/t/n.aspx?articleid=1350&zoneid=12>

If you use ZoneAlarm, you’ll have a yellow caution sign on “Teredo Tunneling” in Device Manager. To fix this, in Zone Alarm go to Firewall>Advance and the “Enable IPv6 Networking” must by checked.

And one final little QUARK – if you have a large SATA hard drive that for some reason disappears when you quickly come out of Sleep you might want to check out KB977178. Apparently Windows 7 only gives drives 10 secs to respond when you wake from sleep and my 750GB didn’t like that… the hotfix gives the drives a bit more time and I haven’t had any issues since.

Now to enjoy a machine that is considerably faster than that old P4 2.6…


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