Greetings-

I've been lurking out here for a while and enjoying reading this list, and
now I have a question or two for you build-it gurus.

I (ahem) had a computer built (I know, I weenied out. I'll build the next
one myself), and when I got it, I decided to pop the hood and see what was
up, so to speak.

One thing troubled me immediately, but I decided to put the question to you
guys before bothering the builder. Just to be sure I'm not too far off
base, you know.

The builder slaved the CD-ROM drive to the hard drive, with both on the
primary IDE port on the MOBO. Besides the fact that this will make it
difficult to add another drive at a later time, my understanding is that
doing it this way will compromise the performance of the HD. Something
about the IDE port being no faster than the slowest device attached to it,
which in this case is the CD-ROM drive.

There is a secondary IDE port available, and my assumption is that the
builder did it the way he did to avoid the expense of another IDE cable. I
figure that I'll buy the cable and make the switch myself.

One problem is that I can't find a jumper to set the IRQ of the secondary
IDE controller. I've done that before on another box- in fact, I learned it
the hard way: I was trying to install a CD-ROM drive on a secondary
controller, and it kept crashing the system. Took me three days to realize
that there were jumpers to set, and that both IDE ports were set to IRQ 14.
I set the secondary to 15 and suddenly everything worked.

I've checked the manual for the MOBO (a Biostar with an Award BIOS {I know-
an inexpensive MOBO}), and I see in the CMOS setup that the secondary can
be enabled, and I think that it indicates that it will be set IRQ 15, but
I'm not entirely sure on this one. Anybody know?

The next question: if I manage to enable the port and get the IRQ set
correctly, do I need to remove the current CD-ROM from Win95 and let it
(hopefully) be redetected in the right location on bootup?

A last question on another subject- opening and then closing certain
windows tends to leave little flyspecks on the desktop. The worst offender
is the box that pops up when you right click anywhere on the desktop. Close
that, and it leaves these three little specks behind. You get the same
effect any number of times by opening and closing that box. Opening other
windows over those spots removes them when the window is closed. I assume
that this has something to do with the video card (Diamond Stealth 3D 2000
w/4meg) or the way the processor handles the video (AMD K-6 233mhz). This
is mostly an annoyance, but any suggestions would be appreciated.

TIA-

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Rick Lindstrom
<[log in to unmask]>
Tallahassee, FL
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