Franky has been getting alot of poking and prodding lately. Ever since we hauled him down and plugged the power in coincidentally. This section is about the ATI video card install, and the install of the USB ports.

The USB is the section that I have done when writing this on 3/22/01. This is assuming you are using the Belkin USB ports add-on.

Our mother board has two ports for this. They are just to the left of the memory and PCI slots. Coming from the edge of the board there are 5 pins on top and 4 pins below that. It looks something like this. <PRE>

______________________________ |

|XXXXX | On the bottom row, the pins are in |XXXX | this configuration (left to right) | |=========| | +5v, D-, D+, Gnd. | (PCI slots) | | | | | | | | | |_____________________________|

</PRE> In English, the only thing that you have to remember is (on the Belkin connectors) plug the cable onto the pins so that the RED wire is closest to the EDGE of the board.

Well, now that it is 3-26-01, and the weekend is once again over, and the pain of the monday-4-days-left reality is setting in, I feel it is time to talk about the ATI card that we put in Franky. It seems to work very well after testing. I do not have nay benchmarks to validate this conclusion (yet) but I did do some testing with David using the computer for its practical application: input of video onto the screen to get put on the projector. It worked flawlessly in either windowed, or full screen mode, reglular size or zoomed. Since that is the biggest application that it would be used for it seems that even if some of the others would need to be tweaked or fiddled with, the main purpose would be served using upgraded boxes.

The harddrive that I put in is also running beautifully. I had to get a setup utility from Maxtor's website, and use it to make an installation disk. (Did we get one of those?). But after I got it in and noticed then it is loving being in its new home. Alas, if only everyone could see the beauty in being put in their own unique home.... (Whoops, jumped to Monday-induced soapbox). I still have yet to take out the old hard drive (the 2GB) because the old hard drive likes being where it is too (beautiful isn't it???)... So I have to be an evil being that is going to rip up a happy home. More on that one later.

To find all the software necessary for the upgrades, go to my workstation on the network, CM-win98test1, select the public directory, and go to the Frankenstein section...everything is labeled from there. Also, the public directory has the standard password for access, since it is a network share.