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Raistline on 23 June 2016
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Ganoncrotch said:
Raistline said:

Oh and don't forget, don't force anything into a slot. I know how it sounds almost silly to say this but I have seen a lot of people that tried to force a RAM stick in place with too much force and broke both the mobo and the stick of RAM because they had it upside down.

All slots on a PC are keyed to prevent you from pitting anything in incorrectly so just pay attention to that. This goes for the power connectors too.

And I promise you, you are quite lucky that everything is keyed now. On my first build, pack in the day of Pentium (not even Pentium II) you could easily connect power cables to the wrong place. Most IDE cables could be installed upside down without knowing it, and the motherboards had jumpers for just about every setting that you now see inside the BIOS. Not to mention ISA and PCI slots that used the same port for different verisons/speed ratings and were not backward/forwrad compatible.

At that time too Dell had a completely different power supply layout to every other PC manufacturer, they went with a proprietary line up for the voltages, meant you couldn't swap out a dell psu for a normal one, ahh... good... awful times.

And yeah Dreamcast, make sure you move the little blue (normally) bit of plastic to the side when you're sliding the graphics card into the slot for it, just a slight move to the side on some motherboards while you slide in the card.

I remember that DELL BS all too well. Gateway Computers also did the exact same thing.

A fond memory I have from back in the day was purchasing a CD-Burner. The CD burner did not list it's requirements on the box. At the time I had a PII 233 OC'd to ~266 (FSB Jumber Oveclock), I don't remeber how much RAM I had, but it was probably 32MB. So I went ahead and installed the CD-Rom which used the 33Mhz IDE standard (this was the first time IDE was keyed that I experienced). The mobo only had 1 IDE port and 1 Floppy port so I had to figure swap the jumper to set the CD-Burner as SLAVE. I could not use Line becuase it was in the 1st position on the cable. After installing the drivers from the Floppy disc I found I forgot set the HDD as Master and the CD-Burner was not recognized. 

I got that solved and everything was working except for one critial part. Burning CD's were running at .3X on an 8X burner and I constantly got Buffer Underrun errors. I had to call the support line for the drive and found out that the reason it did not work correctly was becuase the minimum requirements was 66mhz IDE and at least a 300mhz CPU with at minimum 512kb l2 cache, and 32MB of memory. I had to suck it up and return the CD-Burner, but I was able to find a 4X burner that met my system requirements. In the end my CPU was a tad too slow and the IDE bus was 1 step short. The CPU speed caused the slow burning and the IDE speed caused the buffer underrun errors. Oh Fun times.