Building myself a Windows XP DAW PC

[DrNomis_44]

Hi Everyone,


I guess you must be wondering what I have been up to yesterday and today?, well, I have been working on building a small Windows XP DAW PC using a Compaq Presario desktop PC I scored from the rubbish bins yesterday, I spent the best half of yesterday afternoon getting Windows XP Pro Service Pack 3 installed on it and it seems to be running fine with no signs of flaky behaviour, here are the specs for the Compaq Presario PC:

* Motherboard Asus A8M2N-LA.

* CPU AMD Athlon 64 3500+ 2.2Ghz Single Core.

* Ram X2 512 Mb DDR2 ( I have some other DDR2 sticks that I'm going to try to see if they work).

* HDD X1 160 Gb Sata (there's also a 2Tb Sata drive I installed in it but I don't know if it's still any good).

* Optical Drives X2 DVD R/W.


I've got three PCI Express Graphics cards that I'm going to try in the machine to see if any of them are still working, when I grabbed the machine from the bins there was also a keyboard,mouse, and LCD monitor, they all seem to be working perfectly, there was also a small bag of cables too, so I grabbed the lot.

I managed to find my old Digi001 Audio Interface together with it's PCI card and connecting cable, once I've got a good graphics card installed, I'm going to see if I can get the Digi001 installed and working with the Compaq PC, and then it'll be onto the fun of installing some music software on it, might even see if I can set it up as a small ProTools rig, we shall see.

I'll post a pic of the Compaq Presario PC shortly for you so you can see what it looks like, stay tuned.


And here it is, the LCD Monitor,Keyboard, and Mouse you see in the pic are what I scored with the computer:




I ended up going with my spare ATI Radeon HD 4870 512Mb Graphics card and installed it in the Compaq PC prior to taking the above pic.


Next job is to download and install the Windows XP driver for the installed graphics card before I move onto getting the Digi001 PCI card installed.

By the way, the 2Tb Sata HDD turned out to be no good, so I will be replacing it with a good one later on, with DAW computers, it's a good idea to have one HDD for the operating system and DAW software, and then have a separate HDD for storing recorded audio.

[Kick]

Nice work! Reminds me of the early days when I built my own pc's.

I don't know if you run your own home network but be careful because XP is no longer supported by MS Best is to have this pc as a standalone pc without an internet or home network connection.

[DrNomis_44]

Nice work! Reminds me of the early days when I built my own pc's.

I don't know if you run your own home network but be careful because XP is no longer supported by MS Best is to have this pc as a standalone pc without an internet or home network connection.

Good point, although I did have to connect the Compaq PC up to my Wireless Router via a LAN cable so that I could activate and update Windows XP, I'm using a 16Gb Thumbdrive to transfer drivers I've downloaded from my Windows 10 PC onto the Compaq, so I won't really need to connect it to the internet unless I really need to, I might see if I can get Malwarebytes Anti-Malware installed on the Compaq PC just to be safe.


You know what?, in a weirdly perverse way, it's cool to hear those old Windows XP desktop sounds again...haha, or maybe I'm just being nostalgic....lol.

On a side note, I just found a website that sells 1Gb DDR2 PC5300 Ram sticks for only about $13.00 each, so, I'm going to order a set of four next fortnight so I can max out the ram in the Compaq, it currently has two 512Mb DDR2 PC5300 sticks installed, I do have a couple of other DDR2 sticks but they don't work at all.

[DrNomis_44]

Update:

I've just finished installing the drivers for the ATI Radeon HD 4870 Graphics Card, and the Digi001 Standalone ASIO Driver, all seems to have gone smoothly and the Compaq PC seems to be playing happily with the newly installed graphics card, now to find out if my Digi001 is working properly after restarting the computer.


Update 2:


Well I've finally encountered a problem, basically the Digi001 Standalone XP driver that Avid provides doesn't seem to want to install properly in Windows XP, I get a message saying that Windows couldn't find the device (the Digi001 PCI card) even though it shows up in Device manager (it shows up as Multimedia Controller under Other Devices), and is physically installed in a PCI slot on the motherboard, not sure whether it's the PCI card or Windows XP's UAC (User Accounts Control) that's causing it.

Tried uninstalling it and then re-installing it a few times, no luck.

[Dedman]

Did you try going the other way... go to the device and point it to the driver?

[Simon Barden]

Or install the driver first without the card installed, then put the card in? Sometimes the order is very important for the first install. Also, sometimes companies stop providing the full install package with the later driver updates, so if there's a list of older drivers, see if there's one with a much larger size than the latest one, or one that says it's the full install kit, then try installing that and then install the latest XP driver afterwards. I've been caught out like that with some hardware when updating PCs. Stuff that used to work no longer worked when I loaded the latest driver, and had to go back to an older version first that included some required support programs (that presumably never needed updating).

[DrNomis_44]

Cheers mates, I'll give that a go and see if it works.

[Simon Barden]

However, I seem to recall that XP didn't like using ASIO software for its system sounds, so you might not be able to use the ASIO driver until you get some DAW software installed.

You said you've got Windows sounds, so is that with the Digi001, or built-in motherboard sounds? On my old XP DAW, I disabled the motherboard sound chip in the BIOS, so that it only used the M-Audio PCI audio card I had. Always a standard tweak to disable all the windows system sounds to avoid conflict and glitches when using your DAW.

[DrNomis_44]

However, I seem to recall that XP didn't like using ASIO software for its system sounds, so you might not be able to use the ASIO driver until you get some DAW software installed.

You said you've got Windows sounds, so is that with the Digi001, or built-in motherboard sounds? On my old XP DAW, I disabled the motherboard sound chip in the BIOS, so that it only used the M-Audio PCI audio card I had. Always a standard tweak to disable all the windows system sounds to avoid conflict and glitches when using your DAW.

I was getting the windows sounds with the motherboard's integrated sound, which uses the Realtek Audio codec, I'll see if I can find and downoad a pdf of the motherboard user manual, cause i might have to configure a jumper to disable the integrated audio, i was thinking that there might have been a resource conflict that may have been causing the problem, I've also tried re-installing the driver using Windows XP compatibility mode, Ive even tried re-installing the PCI card in a different PCI slot (that can sometimes fix things), no luck with that.

[Simon Barden]

It may be a jumper, but it's often a BIOS option. Which reminds me - probably worth replacing the MOBO battery now, so that you know it's good and doesn't die on you soon and loses any setup changes you may have made.