Definitely doable. Vista's bootloader is actually pretty good for multiple booting. Not exactly EASY to set up but it's doable for anyone who is multiple-booting in the first place.
Steve, that looks like a great deal. I am sure some of the components are not as good as the custom ones, but the 20" monitor for free is really appealing. I really don't need a new monitor, but it would be nice to have. I really hate LCD monitors for graphic design, by the way. Colors at the top of the screen look different than the ones on the bottom or middle, and it took me awhile to get used to dragging images into the middle to see if they match, It's still a major pain in the ass, especially if I have to match Pantone colors.
Dell monitors aren't great (at least the low end ones). But they're worth $200 easy. You can always ebay it. As for the rest, the mainboard is 2nd tier (they use Foxconn) with almost no user options via the bios. I think that's what pisses off people about Dells the most. But it's perfectly adequate for the design specs of all the components so if you're not into overclocking it's a good machine. The power supply they put in is minimal. Probably about 350W. Enough for the machine as configured. You really can't compete with the high volume computer makers unless you're going to build a bleeding edge machine these days. Middle or low end not so much. But you still have to shop their sites. If you go through the "home user" portal they are more expensive. One place they fall short is media center (HTPC) computers. It's difficult to find an inexpensive machine with what you need to connect fully to a home theater. You can build a good HTPC for less than a grand, but try to find one retail and you're looking at $2K and up.
It's intelligence-insulting when you have an HTPC right next to a regular PC of the same configuration minus a TV tuner and Windows MCE, there's a $1000 between them, and a $100 TV tuner card one aisle over.
Hmm, alright, I finally got it yesterday, but I thought I'd pick your brains a little bit more. I have an old DVD burner that I want to install into this new computer, but when I opened it up, WTF?!? Everything is different now! The DVD drive used to be connected to those big thick grey wires, the ones with the 20+ pins. Now, I don't see any configuration for that on this new motherboard. Attached is a picture below. A) I see no grey thick wires for hard drives/DVD's, but the ones that give power to the system are still present. They wrapped it up in a big ball out of sight, which is good. B) The Hard Drive is down here. I can't open the other side of the computer to see what they use in place of the big greys, but it looks like it may be that new red wire now. If so, what is this red wire called, and is it the same as before, where you just attach multiple devices to the same wire, then plug it into the motherboard? C) I also have a TV Tuner card I'd like to install. Would it go into the white slots as shown in 'C'? Right now, there is a wireless network card and a sound card in two of the slots. There are no more slots, except a smaller blue one right above the "MS7380". What is this for?
pretty A)The big grey flat wires were parallel (pata), we've since gone the way of serial (sata) drives. Better throughput and better air circulation. You have what looks like a eide pata controller though, the yellow female ports down on the lower right look accommodating. Use your old grey flat wire to connect to this (if you really want to clutter it up). Or get a new sata dvd drive. B) see A C) dunno, can't see. Chances are it's a spare pci-e slot; you might have to get a different tuner card. edit: ok Here's your board: Looks like you've got two PCI slots, both being used, and you have a couple spare PCI E x8 slots (one is buried under that port replicator) edit edit: the sound card is redundant.
The old DVD burner's data bus is Parallel ATA (PATA) aka EIDE aka IDE. The large yellow rectangles will plug into it just fine (it's actually 40 (well, 39 + 1 No Contact) pins, 80 conductors). Just be sure to plug the blue end of the cable into the motherboard, and check to make sure that the jumper on the drive is set to Cable Select (there's probably a diagram on the label on the top of the drive). Most hard drives today are connected via Serial ATA (SATA). You have 4 ports on that motherboard; you cannot plug in more than 1 per port or per cable, as opposed to PATA which is 2 per cable (for a total of 4 PATA, 4 SATA devices for the system). C. You need a new TV tuner card; the one you have does go in C (a PCI slot), which you're out of (and suddenly you've made me very glad I went with a motherboard with 3 PCI slots for my own computer). You'll need a PCI-Express TV tuner (or PCI-E network or sound card; unless it's really high-end, I imagine replacing the sound or network card would be cheapest). I THINK PCI-E cards that are shorter than the physical length of the port will work, which is good because most PCI-E TV tuners are PCI-E x1, and those are x16 slots, even though they operate at a maximum of x8. BTW, that's a very nice looking computer!
The last of my components got here today. As expected, my CPU overclocked from 1.8GHz to 2.88GHz with no problems whatsoever. I tried 3.6 for shits and giggles. No dice. I'll try in between later. I'd post pictures, but the case is elsewhere at the moment, so it's all "assembled" in a cardboard box with foam padding, and it looks more like a wire-wrap with an expansion card than a computer.
Expensive cases though! It was originally the shipping box for an AppleCare repair. Surprisingly, the motherboard fits just snugly in the space meant for a 15" PowerBook. Of course, the real problem is that the power supply and optical drive are sitting outside the box. Still, with some foam and cardboard cutting, I could probably rearrange things to fit.
Yeah, the dude at the computer center said that too. So I took it out! I am returning it tomorrow, but in the mean time, I have no sound! I went to the MSI website and downloaded their whole HD Audio Drivers package, and installed it, to no avail. In fact, when I go into Control Panel > Sounds & Audio Devices, the program events "play" button is greyed out. It's like it's not detecting there is a sound board there. Is there somethnig wrong with my motherboard sound card, or is it they just turned it off because I had a Soundblaster installed?
The onboard sound is disabled via the bios. you need to F2 or something (varies per mainboard, usually says which on the monitor when you first start the machine) at boot time to access the bios settings.
IIRC, its Del on MSI motherboards, at least ones with an Award BIOS. But check Windows first. If it was manually disabled in Windows before the other sound card was put in, it wouldn't come up again automatically when the sound card was removed. I forget which version of Windows you're using... if it's XP, use the Device Manager. If it's Vista, use whatever the equivalent is.
