Woah this thread whent pretty quick since I posted last ...
>> Sorry people. I'm going to have to make you jealous....I just got a new 17" LCD screen <<
Nice, but I'm packing a 22" CRT and a 19" LCD on my desktop
...
As for booting your system after you've connected it, these days it's a lot easier. Simply go into the bios and change the boot order so that the cd is first and whack your xp cd in the drive...follow the prompts.
I remember the old days where you had to have startup diskettes and you needed your jumpers on your hdd, these days your mobo is not your average bear.
Don't worry about frying your system just take it slow and double check everything... and then check it again.
Make sure your mobo is mounted properly on the rubber spacers or your mobo won't be the only thing to fry
..
Don't assemble it or even take anything out of it's antistatic packaging over carpet. If you are going to make sure you earth yourself before touching something. Do this by just grabbing your case or get some copper wire and wrap it around your wrist and onto your case, just make sure it's long enough to move your arm a metre and a bit so you can use two hands when putting stuff in.
Make sure that you set the right switches for your cpu on the mobo, and then check it again. Always check stuff again before turning it on.
Make sure your ram is seated properly wouldn't want to burn it out.
Make sure you pull your safety pin on your agp slot out before putting your graphics card it as well..
It's pretty hard not to get everything in the right way and the right spot these days though.
And LiteOn is cheap because that's their selling point
... you don't see it often but they literally have good quality value for money hardware.
I can also recommend Acer for drives, they are taking a hint from LiteOn these days and trying to follow suite. I got another drive for my desktop beast last year, Acer cd-burner, $45 and it actually was 10/10 in all the reviews out.
Winston, your system will cost a packet! As much as my desktop was at the start of this year even. My system was $7500, and I'm planning on selling the mobo and graphics card in about 3 months to upgrade to a pci-express mobo and graphics card. Keeping my 3400+ AMD 64 cpu though.
Why do you want to go dual is my main question? And why 3gb of ram? I must admit I have 3gb of ram but I didn't pay for my system (present from a business partner) so I maxed out the specs.
Dual will only help if you do lots of multi tasking. If you do intense 3d rendering or compiling many tens of thousands of lines of source code. Or if you want to do distributed computing projects.
It won't increase game speed, it might infact lower it. You would be just wasting your money..
It's not 2 x power it's 2 x computers. It's like having 2 desktops so you can work on to different things at once and not notice a performance hit.