NO MORE FLOPPIES
Have we come to the point
where a PC can be built
without a floppy drive? I want
to build an Athlon 64 system
housed in Antec’s Aria SFF
case, but I’m wondering how I
would apply BIOS updates and
the like without a floppy drive.
Can I use a USB key drive or a
CF card instead?
—DAVID ROWELLFirst, you can indeed build a PC
without a floppy drive (even with
RAID support, if you read this
month’s how-to section). But if the
motherboard you use requires that
you boot to a floppy to update the
BIOS, your hands are tied. Most
modern motherboards support
Windows-based BIOS updates
though, and some also have the
software to rewrite the BIOS
installed in the motherboard. But
even if you’re dependant on a flop-
py, it needn’t dictate the makeup of
your PC. You could simply use a USB-
based floppy to boot (for some moth-
erboards only), or you can just keep a
floppy drive loose on a cable in your
tool kit. When you have to update the
BIOS, just crack the case open, plug
in the floppy and run the update.WAITING IS THE
HARDEST PART
I have a quick question for you:
How much longer will it take
for things like DDR2 and PCI
Express to arrive? I’m interested
in building a new system and
want to integrate these new
technologies, but I want to
know how long I’ll have to wait.
—SPC ANDRES D. HUNTER
10TH MOUNTAIN DIV, IRAQThe wait is over. DDR2 and PCI
Express motherboards for Intel
CPUs should be on the market by the
time you read this. AMD CPUs sup-
porting PCI Express aren’t expected
for another month or two. AMD has
also been mum about its support for
DDR2, but the Doc believes AMD
is just waiting for higher-speed
grades of DDR2 before it supports
the new memory standard.LYING DOWN ON THE JOB
Doctor, I have a system in a tower
case and I want to know if I can
lay it on its side and run it that
way. Can I damage my system by
doing this?
—ISSAC SMITHIn the 1980s, conventional wisdom
held that you should format the hard
drive in the position the system
would be used in. If you, say, kept
your tower on its side, you were
supposed to reformat the drive in
that orientation. Whether that was
true or not, today’s hardware has
no such restrictions that the Doctor
knows about. You should be fine,assuming you’re not blocking any
vents and your optical drives are
capable of being run on their sides
(even so, you may get a few more
scratches on optical discs from
spinning down with the optical
drive on its side).FAN-TASTIC QUESTION
The article about the 15 common
PC upgrade mistakes in your July
issue was very helpful but I had a
question about mistake #11: How
can I tell if my case fan is facing
the wrong way? Should certain
fans direct airflow in certain
directions or does it not matter?
—RICH FLOYDGenerally, you want a well-designed
airflow plan. For most ATX cases, the
conventional wisdom has been to
suck air in the front and blow it out
the back. You want as much air as
possible moving through the case to
keep your hardware cool. If your sys-
tem is running too hot and the CPU
is overheating, you should consider
reversing the airflow so you suck
cool air in the rear so the processor
gets the coolest air possible. You
should then vent air out the front of
the machine.SOME SOUND ADVICE
I’m obsessed with high-quality
sound and recently bought aI feel I do a pretty good job of taking care of
my computer. In particular, I’ve scheduled a
daily defragging of my hard drive to keep all
my files nice and tidy on the disk. I’ve noticed,
however, that the more often I do that, the
further out the paging file seems to move.
Because the drive performs best near the center,
wouldn’t this hurt my performance? It would
seem I’m defeating the purpose of defragging
if the page file gets moved further and further
out. Is there a way to reverse this problem?
Should I defrag less often?
—DANIEL WONGFrequent defragging isn’t harmful to your drive, so
defrag as often as you like. As far as the page file is
concerned, this is something of a can of worms, so
we’ll take it one issue at a time.
First, when you defrag within Windows, the
page file is not defragged, because the page file is
locked by Windows while the OS is running. The
only way to defrag the page file is to use a third-
party app like Diskeeper (www.executivesoftware.
com) and to select a boot-time defrag, which
defrags the page file prior to loading Windows.
Interestingly, Diskeeper doesn’t touch the page
file during normal, in-Windows defrags, but dur-
ing boot-time operation it moves the page file to
the front of the drive platters. Also, according to
Diskeeper the difference in performance between
a page file residing at the front, center, or end of a
drive’s platter is negligible, at best.
So even though the page file isn’t being moved
by the defrag software, it’s still possible the page filecould move slowly across the drive if it’s constantly
being expanded and then compacted by Windows.
This happens because by default Windows has a
minimum and a maximum value to use for the page
file, and as it swaps content in and out of this area
the size dedicated to this process expands and then
shrinks, which can lead to the page file moving
across the drive like a snail.
To thwart this process, you need to specify the
same amount of storage space for both the minimum
and maximum amount of space to be used for the file
by doing the following: Right-click My Computer,
select Properties, Advanced, and then under
“Performance” select Settings, Advanced, and under
“Virtual memory” click the Change button. Then
simply enter the same value for the maximum and
minimum (between one and a half and two times the
amount of system memory is ideal) and click “set.”
This is actually a pretty good practice for anyone, as
it prevents the page file from getting fragmented in
the first place.DEFEATED BY DEFRAGGING?
Ask the Doctor Symptom Diagnosis Cure
66 MA XIMUMPC OCTOBER 2004
By default, the
Windows’ page
file constantly
grows and
shrinks to suit
its needs. This
results in frag-
mentation of the
page file as well
as files in its
proximity.