Building Mike's New PC
Posted by Mike Ungerman on February 15, 2010 at 1:00am
So, I purchased a new PC. Should be easy just to plug it in, run the setup and be up and running in an hour or two, right?
Not for Mike! Gotta make things difficult. So here goes my trials and tribulations as I attempt to set up a "super" PC based on an HP Pavilion Elite HPE that was on sale for about 30% off two weeks ago from HP. I had been notified of the sale from one of the deals RSS feeds that I get on a daily basis.
First of all, I chose to configure the PC with Intel's newest series of processor, the i7 Quad Core at 2.8 ghz. It's Intel's latest iteration of the Core II series with a lot of improvements. It's also my first true 64 bit system, configured from scratch for Windows 7 64 bit O/S with 8gb of RAM, 1 TB hard drive, DVD R/W, Blue-Ray player, TV tuner, ATI dual DVI graphics card (HDMI capable if you give up one of the DVI ports and use a converter plug,) surround sound (via a number of mini phone plugs or an optical out port, and a 15 way flash card reader. I then decided I wanted to add a Solid State Drive (SSD) as a boot drive and researched the best configuration of speed with a controller that supports the TRIM command to efficiently manage the space on the drive. I chose a G.Skill Falcon II (FM-25S21-64GBF2) 64gb drive. I could have splurged for a similar 128gb model, but my intent was to only have the operating system on it and put the rest of the storage on the1 TB drive in various partitions.
The computer came with Windows 7, 64-bit O/S in a typical image ready to install. However, it's recommended to install Windows on a SSD without any other drives currently attached to the system. I'm a member of Microsoft's Tech-Net and with my annual subscription, I have 10 licenses for each of the various configurations of Windows' operating system, so I decided to use one of my licenses to do a clean install of Windows 7 Ultimate on the SSD and just do away with the licensed copy of Windows Home Premium that comes with the HP. One of these days I'll have to see if I can recover the license code for that instance of the O/S from HP so I might use it on another computer, but I've got a hunch that it's considered an OEM version of Windows and only meant for an HP.
I started my build Friday afternoon by opening up the HP case. Yes, I'm invalidating my warranty by doing this, but I figure unless infant mortality takes its toll on me, I should be in good shape to restore any configuration I need to before presenting a warranty claim.
HP uses a mini-motherboard that looks proprietary. I do not see any familiar branding on the board to indicate who is building it for them. The case is a medium tower, just a bit larger than a micro-tower. There is no provision for a floppy drive, and there is a blank slot for HP's proprietary cartridge drive inside with a cover in the front to insert a cartridge if the drive mechanism is installed (which it is not on my computer.) The SATA 1TB hard drive is mounted in a metal cage which is removable with two screws and a release lever. There is room to add another hard drive if wanted along with a spare SATA cable jack on the motherboard. The power for the hard drive has three SATA power connectors on it; there are no "Molex" 4 pin connectors at all coming from the power supply.
And there was my first problem, as my SSD came with an optional 3.5" plastic frame to mount it in what would have been either the floppy slot or the second hard drive slot. The carrier has a space for a nice small fan which I purchased, but the fan's cable connects either with a 3 pin motherboard connector, or a Molex adapter. Neither of which I could use.
I spent the better part of Friday and Saturday morning researching sources for a SATA to Molex power adapter, and not finding one readily available in Orlando, I ordered one from Cables To Go; it should come in Wednesday. In retrospect, I probably don't need it as the computer and SSD run very cool; surprising to me given the high power specs, but understandable, I guess, given the power management capabilities of the new Intel products and the power management of the O/S and motherboard BIOS.
Ok, so time to actually start my project.
First, I removed the hard drive from the HP and put it in my SATA dock attached to my "old" computer. Using Acronis True Image, I imaged the whole drive (3 partitions as it comes before initialization) so that if anything happens to the computer, I can always restore the drive to original condition.
Second, I attached a portable 500gb hard drive to my old computer and manually dragged and dropped the folders from the setup partition (that weren't Windows related), and all the applications and drivers. This to give me some setup files after I initialized the HP myself.
I installed my SSD in the HP as the only hard drive, connected a single monitor, keyboard and mouse, attached the power cable and turned it on.
I hit the F10 key to enter the HP bios and checked out the settings. The virtualization capability of the hardware was turned off (HP note in the bios recommended it off, but I'm going use it, so I turned it on.) The SATA controller was defaulted to the RAID mode. Two other options were available: IDE and AHCI. I chose the AHCI which is the advanced SATA interface, and best for the SSD under Windows 7.
I checked the date and time correcting for EST, and then opened up the DVD drive and inserted the Windows 7 installation disc. Then I closed the BIOS and rebooted.
The Windows installation proceeded without incident. I chose a custom install, and made sure it was using all of the SSD's available space. From what I had read, Windows7 is supposed to detect the presence of an SSD and automatically set it up with most of the best settings for it. (more on this later.)
After the final reboot, I connected a network cable to my router and made sure I had a good network connection. I did not allow automatic updates to start, as I wanted to configure a number of settings under Windows to ensure that most of the updates affecting "programs" went to the hard drive and not the SSD.
I then shut down the computer, reconnected the hard drive, inserted Easus Partition Manager's CD in the DVD drive and rebooted. (One can use any partition manager that has a boot disk, such as Acronis Disk Director, but I had downloaded Easus Pro from Giveaway of the Day several weeks ago and made a pro bootable CD from it, so decided to use that.)
I deleted all the existing partitions from the HP's hard drive and then set up 4 partitions of my own with drives and NTFS formatting:
- 1st partition, D, Programs
- 2nd partition, E, Data
- 3rd partition, F, Projects (I'll use this for virtualization space in the future)
- 4th partition, G, Temp (all temporary files will go here)
I show the intended drive letters, but in actuality, have to do some configuration in Windows in order to get them labeled like that. The HP's 2 optical drives and its flash card reader install driver letters too, so they have to be set up properly in the Control Panel using Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Disk Management and reassign drive letters.
Once everything was set, I removed the CD and rebooted into Windows. I first headed for the Disk Management application and set default drive letters for all the installed drives:
- SSD: defaulted to C
- 1st optical drive (the one in the top slot) as Y
- 2nd optical drive (the one on the 2nd slot) as Z (I've used Y and Z as my CD drives for as long as I can remember, and it gets them out of the way for the constant change one sees as you attach various devices that get drive letters.)
- Flash Card Reader: U,V,W, and X (The card reader assigns for drive letters which are in the way of the hard drive and I didn't like the auto-assignment.)
- Then the hard drive's 4 partitions as above.
Next I analyzed what was already installed by Windows and where Windows had installed everything. Windows 64 uses two Program Files folders: C:\Program Files is for 64 bit applications; C:\Program Files (x86) is for 32 bit applications.
I want all my programs to reside on the D: partition of my hard drive, so using Windows Explorer, I copied the two folders from my C: partition to my D: partition. I didn't delete anything yet, as I wanted to make sure that everything would work once copied.
To start with, I want any registry entries pointing to C:\Program files to point to D:\Program Files. So I fired up the registry editor (Start, Run, regedit) and searched for:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE SOFTWARE Microsoft Windows CurrentVersion
In the right window there is a key for "ProgramFilesDir"; I changed it from C: to D:
There is also a path for "Common Files"; That too should be changed from C: to D:
And a variable for %ProgramFiles% which should be changed from C: to D:
One might think that that's all that should have to be changed, but I started searching (Edit, Find) for: "C:\Program" (left off "Files" since there are other settings that start this way) and found, literally, tons of them. I wish I had downloaded a good registry editor with a batch search and replace, but I didn't so I spent the better part of the next several hours going through and changing all the entries that began with "C:\Program" to "D:\Program". And Windows wouldn't let me change some of the entries that involved Internet Explorer in the path. This was the first time that I realized that the registry was something more than just a text file read in at boot time. It can have individual entries locked. I'm still looking into what I have to do to unlock an entry, or to access it, perhaps in the safe mode.
Recall that I'm doing this editing BEFORE I even install any of my own programs or let Windows do any updates. Even with all that, there are hundreds of entries to change.
[Flash back entry ala "Lost": It's now several days and a number of programs installed. All of them defaulted to C:\Program Files as their location even though I had changed the registry! I made sure for most of them that I did a custom install and was able to choose the installation folder. I just had to be sure that if they weren't 64 bit programs I put them in the Program Files (x86) folder on the D: drive. Still searching for a good registry editor, because many program installations are putting data in more folders on the C:\ drive than I want them to.]
[to be continued.....]
