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The September 23 meeting of the Orangevale chapter featured the live construction of a functioning computer. James Frolich and Mike Evans agreed to demonstrate the procedures involved in building a personal computer at home. To aid the group in catching all the details, Dennis Richardson used a video camera connected to the chapter's projector to give close-ups of the details involved in the assembly process. The two assembled the computer outside the case on the tabletop, which also helped group members to get a close-up view.
James began the presentation by reviewing the decision-making process he and Mike went through in selecting the major components. He thinks the most important decision lies in deciding the intended use for the completed machine. This one, for example, will be used as a business workstation, not as a multimedia, game-playing, Web-surfing powerhouse. Accordingly, he and Mike selected the AMD K6-2_400mhz CPU as having the best power to cost ratio for this particular usage. The motherboard we selected was a DFI P5BV+ /e, which is a low-end, Supersocket 7, AT motherboard that can run PC100 SDRAM DIMM modules. Together, the motherboard/CPU combination cost Mike $100, which makes for a very economical upgrade.
Before the meeting, the motherboard was mounted on the case's removable back plate and a 64MB SDRAM DIMM chip was installed. With the plate on the tabletop, and using Dennis' video close-ups, James showed how to use the motherboard manual to determine the correct settings for the board's jumpers and switches for this particular processor. In the process, he explained bus speeds and multiplier factors and how to determine the correct settings for any type of processor rated for use with this motherboard. After the board was set up, Mike proceeded to show how to install an AGP video card and attach a 1.44MB floppy disk drive, a 1GB hard disk drive and an ATAPI CDROM. Pin one orientations were easily observed on the overhead projector and James carefully explained the differences between primary and secondary IDE channels and how to set jumpers on the devices to establish them as either master or slaves on the channel.
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When everything was connected, the video card was connected to the projector and Mike turned on the switch. To everyone's delight-not to say amazement-the screen lit right up, correctly identifying the CPU and accurately portraying the amount of memory present. James pushed the delete key to enter the Award BIOS CMOS. He then spent the better part of a half hour attempting to demystify many of the BIOS settings and reassure everyone that it was possible to recover from an error by recording the settings before starting and simply reloading the defaults if something went wrong.
Finally, with the CMOS set to automatically identify the drives, a Windows 98 boot disk was inserted into the floppy drive and the machine was allowed to boot to the disk. James walked the group through the use of FDISK to set up the partitions and then used format /s to format the hard disk drive. The successful conclusion of the formatting process brought an end to the demonstration and the remaining time was given over to a question and answer session.
The Orangevale/Folsom Chapter meets on the fourth Thursday of each month at the Church of Religious Science in Orangevale, 6035 Main Avenue, between Greenback Lane and Madison Avenue, from 7 p.m. until 9 p.m. Everyone is welcome. The next meeting will be October 28.
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Mike Evans
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