First Steps with a New Laptop

My 6224W should be with me in the next few days (stay calm, stay calm).

Seeing as I have an OEM copy of XP Home lying around at home I have ordered the laptop without an operating system installed. However, its been a long time since I last assembled/mucked around with PCs.

Is it really just a simple case of turning the lappy on and sticking the XP disk in the drive? Will the correct BIOS be pre-installed?

Any other tips gratefully received.

Thanks.

 

The correct bios will be installed, but you might have to play with some bios settings. I am not sure if the boot order in the bios is set to boot from cd/dvd first. You need that to boot from cd and install windows.

Other thing is the SATA drivers and XP. Windows XP will not detect your hard disk because it cant use SATA. But dont worry it sounds worese that it is. Eithere the bios will have an option for the SATA to emulate PATA so that WinXP can be installed without drivers. Or you will need to put the drivers onto the Windows install cd and burn a new cd.
For that you need 3 things. A program called nlite (freeware), a Windows install cd, and the drivers for the SATA which you can find at zepto.com or intel.com.
The last option to make SATA work would be to use a floppy disk for the driver but I dont think many people have a USB floppy.

 

Thanks Wave,

When I popped the disk in the drive it recognised the hard disk quite happily so I assumed that SATA drivers were already present and carried on with installation of Windows XP.

However SiSoft reports that my HDD is not running in its optimal mode - is this a problem? Is it possible for a SATA HDD to be running in a slower mode or would the hard disk just not run at all without SATA drivers?