The Hardware and Installation
December 30, 2007 – 4:24 pmI decided to install WHS on an old PC that I no longer had any use for. My trusty old Shuttle SN41G2(v1). The Spec:
- AthlonXP 2200 CPU
- 2×512Mb Ram
- 2×320Gb PATA Hard Drives
- DVD burner (not required after WHS installation)
This PC has passed its best, and I was struggling to find a use for it, and then along came WHS. It easily exceeds the WHS basic requirements i.e. 1GHz CPU, 512MB RAM, 80GB of free space on the primary drive, and an Ethernet connection.
I’d read some worrying forum posts that mentioned issues with NForce2 montherboards, but I’d hoped that these issues were only with the WHS beta release, and that they had now been resolved. I decided to plough on with the install.
I inserted the WHS Install DVD and booted the PC….all seemed to go well, it took quite a while, and there were many reboots, but it installed without a glitch. When I say installed I mean that WHS was now on the PC, unfortunately there was one driver issue, the network card. Looks like WHS (or strictly speaking Windows Server 2003) did not have a compatible driver for the NForce2 onboard network card. A server without a network connection is like a geek without an RSS reader, it would just sort of sit there and do nothing, wondering what was going on in the world around it. Anyway, a bit of research suggested that old WindowsXP NForce drivers would do the trick, and they did (specifically nForce_2.45_WinXP2K_WHQL_english). After the driver install WHS found the network….and then my router, my trusty Netgear DG834GT.
Next post – UPnP, Firewalls and Firewalls.
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