NeoG_ wrote on 2026-06-11, 11:45:

DustyShinigami wrote on 2026-06-11, 11:22:

It was quite difficult to get everything connected due to how tight everything was, particularly with those PSU cables. Will definitely have to upgrade it to a mid-tower at some point.

Every time I try to make a small computer I end up regretting it

Yeah, I totally get it. Lesson learned. :p

DustyShinigami wrote on 2026-06-11, 12:12:

NeoG_ wrote on 2026-06-11, 11:45:

DustyShinigami wrote on 2026-06-11, 11:22:

It was quite difficult to get everything connected due to how tight everything was, particularly with those PSU cables. Will definitely have to upgrade it to a mid-tower at some point.

Every time I try to make a small computer I end up regretting it

Yeah, I totally get it. Lesson learned. :p

Where you've got the motherboard power headers near an edge of the board, sometimes it makes sense to lose the wiring under the motherboard tray, and tie off some of the drive cables on the back side of the drive cage. That leaves things a lot less "wirey" in the middle.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-06-11, 18:56:

DustyShinigami wrote on 2026-06-11, 12:12:

NeoG_ wrote on 2026-06-11, 11:45:

Every time I try to make a small computer I end up regretting it

Yeah, I totally get it. Lesson learned. :p

Where you've got the motherboard power headers near an edge of the board, sometimes it makes sense to lose the wiring under the motherboard tray, and tie off some of the drive cables on the back side of the drive cage. That leaves things a lot less "wirey" in the middle.

Okay, I’ll have to see what I can do next time. I know connecting the CD drive up was tricky as the hole where the wires come out of the PSU are all bunched together and can’t move around. They’re pretty close to the back end of the CD drive, making it hard to pass the power connectors up to it. I have managed it now, but would definitely need to get a lot of that wiring hidden as they’re resting on top of the CPU cooler.

Okay, had a refund for the other RAM. Turns out the seller didn't get the purchase notification and were busy with a system they'd set up and were problem solving. They happily gave me a refund. Bought some RAM from someone else, which they sent this evening. Should arrive on Saturday. So with any luck, after work, I can test the machine and see if everything's okay.

RAM came a bit later than expected, but it's here and it's installed. Unsurprisingly, there's something wrong. Not sure if I've overlooked something or if this is related to the power supply fuck up I made, but when I turn the PC on, it just beeps. I never noticed it before, but the power button also shows red instead of green.

Do you have another PSU to use or test and see if it clearns up the issue?

Law212 wrote on 2026-06-15, 18:23:

Do you have another PSU to use or test and see if it clearns up the issue?

I do. I've got it out to test.

Turns out the first issue was because the RAM wasn't seated properly. Fixed that. However, it still fails to boot/display anything. Also, the stock cooler fan sounds horrendous! It sounds like a drill! Not healthy or quiet at all. And it still shows a red light on the tower.

Struggling to even remove the ATX connector. 🙁

Okay, took some doing, but got the ATX cable out, connected the full ATX one, and the CPU fan sounds a lot more healthy. So it's possible the other is either knackered by yours truly or it's not powerful enough. I'm leaning towards the former. Got the machine to boot, although I'm still a bit perplexed why the power button goes from green to red. I've never seen it do that. Maybe I failed to connect one of the front panel connectors in before, but surely green is the healthy and powered colour...?

I dont know about the changing colours, but at least its booting and seems like the other PSu is no good.

Okay, it's all sorted now. God only knows what I did before. Tested things one by one and narrowed everything down. Regarding the colours, even though I could have sworn I'd connected them the right way, I clearly hooked the PLED + and PLED - into the wrong pins. I don't know how or why as green would be positive and black would be negative 🤣. So those are working properly. I've also re-connected the SFX PSU back up, connected everything one by one, and low and behold - everything's working. Very odd.

My only issue now is that the BIOS splash screen doesn't show or disappears far too fast. Need to look into that one. Going to attempt to re-install 98 SE next.

Nope. So much for installing 98 then. One minute it recognises the HDD, then I connect the CD drive, and it doesn’t detect it. Change some connections up. It recognises the CD drive, but not the HDD. I’ve tried connecting the HDD to IDE 1 with the jumper set to Master, I’ve had the CD drive connected to IDE 2 and the jumper set to Master, Slave, and removed. And now all of a sudden, the monitor isn’t coming on, despite removing and reconnecting the VGA cable. 😩

I have a similar issue recently setting up a couple computers. Sometimes the video card would come loose from the PCI slot and had to be pushed in again.

Some times the HDD and CD rom wouldnt recognize becuase of jumpers , or the computer just didnt like the hard drive.

Law212 wrote on 2026-06-15, 21:01:

I have a similar issue recently setting up a couple computers. Sometimes the video card would come loose from the PCI slot and had to be pushed in again.

Some times the HDD and CD rom wouldnt recognize becuase of jumpers , or the computer just didnt like the hard drive.

Hmm. At the moment I don’t have a video card connected. The one advantage with this mobo is it has onboard graphics. My main 98 system doesn’t. Or onboard audio. So it’s a bit weird how it’s not detecting anything. If there’s no change later I’ll have to reset the BIOS. Maybe that will kick the drives into touch.

Right. Progress. At last. Resetting the BIOS helped with the VGA issue. After more experimenting, it looks to be the IDE ribbon that's faulty. So replaced it with an 80-pin ribbon. Both hard drive and CD-ROM drives are now recognised. 😀

Slow but steady. Thats how it goes sometimes

I'm definitely cursed. I swear to God. I don't know why, but at random, the monitor just won't come on. I tested this setup earlier and it was fine. Come to use it this evening and the monitor light just blinks and I get nothing. I've tried taking the CMOS battery out and putting it back in, I've put a jumper in place on the BIOS pins and removed it, taken the VGA cable out, put it back in... it's just not having it. And I know the monitor works. 🙁

I just hope to God, when I do eventually install the onboard graphics drivers, and eventually install the Geforce 4 Ti, this doesn't continue to keep happening.

Really don't know what's going on with this system. It just won't accept the onboard graphics at all. Had to install the Geforce 4 card just to be able to use it. And despite installing the USB drivers so I can access other drivers, the response time/read/write speed is shockingly slow. To the point that the whole system stops responding. This was never an issue on my main setup. 🙁 It won't even copy/paste anything off the pen drive onto the HDD. Even something as small as 700Kb. It doesn't even run the onboard graphics drivers.

DustyShinigami wrote on Yesterday, 23:23:

Really don't know what's going on with this system. It just won't accept the onboard graphics at all. Had to install the Geforce 4 card just to be able to use it. And despite installing the USB drivers so I can access other drivers, the response time/read/write speed is shockingly slow. To the point that the whole system stops responding. This was never an issue on my main setup. 🙁 It won't even copy/paste anything off the pen drive onto the HDD. Even something as small as 700Kb. It doesn't even run the onboard graphics drivers.

First I have to say the same thing that @Law212 said:

Law212 wrote on Yesterday, 01:23:

Slow but steady. Thats how it goes sometimes

some systems are hard to get going at first but will become good performers once the issues are resolved, it will make it all the more satisfying when it finally "clicks" together 😀.

The onboard graphics not working is annoying, but if you have a dedicated graphics card then it will not matter in the long run anyway. For the USB data transfer you can try putting the drive into a different USB port, sometimes the problem is only with a single USB port and avoiding that makes things work better. If there is a constant data transfer speed issue when copying files and the system stops responding during these there might be a problem with the HDD, you can use a variety of programs to check for that, for example HDSentinel(https://www.hdsentinel.com/index.php) or if you are familiar with the Linux tool then smartmontools also have a version for Windows XP to download.

MagefromAntares wrote on Today, 00:10:

First I have to say the same thing that @Law212 said: […]
Show full quote

DustyShinigami wrote on Yesterday, 23:23:

Really don't know what's going on with this system. It just won't accept the onboard graphics at all. Had to install the Geforce 4 card just to be able to use it. And despite installing the USB drivers so I can access other drivers, the response time/read/write speed is shockingly slow. To the point that the whole system stops responding. This was never an issue on my main setup. 🙁 It won't even copy/paste anything off the pen drive onto the HDD. Even something as small as 700Kb. It doesn't even run the onboard graphics drivers.

First I have to say the same thing that @Law212 said:

Law212 wrote on Yesterday, 01:23:

Slow but steady. Thats how it goes sometimes

some systems are hard to get going at first but will become good performers once the issues are resolved, it will make it all the more satisfying when it finally "clicks" together 😀.

The onboard graphics not working is annoying, but if you have a dedicated graphics card then it will not matter in the long run anyway. For the USB data transfer you can try putting the drive into a different USB port, sometimes the problem is only with a single USB port and avoiding that makes things work better. If there is a constant data transfer speed issue when copying files and the system stops responding during these there might be a problem with the HDD, you can use a variety of programs to check for that, for example HDSentinel(https://www.hdsentinel.com/index.php) or if you are familiar with the Linux tool then smartmontools also have a version for Windows XP to download.

Thanks. I have used the HDD before and didn’t have any issues, but I can double check.

So far I’ve tried a few of the USB ports, but get the same issue. I’ve also tried using a USB adapter that has more ports. It has USB 3.0 and 2.0. I’ve plugged the pen drive into that to access stuff and plugged the dongle directly into the PC, but get the same result.

I’ll also look at installing everything else first from the driver CD and see what happens.