Installing Operating System
After all the connections have been completed, power on the computer by connecting both the monitor and CPU to a suitable power supply. Ensure that the earthing is proper, else it could damage the computer components and reduce the life of the computer.
Press del while the computer is booting to enter the BIOS and check all the basic BIOS entries to ensure that all the settings are correct.
Depending on your system configuration, you may want to enable or disable various settings - the motherboard manual may have reccommendations for this.
If there is no problem at the BIOS level, the CPU will search for an Operating System installed on your HDD.
For a brand new HDD, if you are installing Windows XP, the following steps have to be taken
- Insert the Windows XP installation CD in the CD ROM drive and reboot.
- Press del again to enter the computer BIOS settings to set CD Rom drive as the first boot-up device.
Reboot your computer to start the Operating System (OS) install. The OS system install will take some time, and you will prompted to provide the license key.
Once Windows XP is completely installed, the other additional hardware like modems, network card, sound card can also be installed. The drivers for these peripherals can be usually downloaded from the manufacturer website.