I set the 2 DVD devices to cable select, but I found that the system would not boot from them.  After I disconnected one the system started to load Windows XP Home from the Windows CD, but would not get all the way (the blue screen of death appeared.)  Same thing happened with the Gentoo Live DVD 2006.1.  I found a thread which seemed relevant and so I hooked up a spare DVD reader to a USB port using a USB 2.0 to IDE adaptor.  Windows now installed, except that the NICs didn't work because the drivers are not present on the Windows XP SP2 CD.

I installed the nVIDIA drivers from the XFX CD without any problem.  I then used the ASUS automatic installation utility and selected the option to install all necessary drivers for the board ("InstAll"), for which four reboots were supposedly required.

When I rebooted the computer, a menu of drivers was shown in a DOS console.  Four of the choices were for writing RAID drivers to a floppy disk, and the fifth menu selection showed me a DOS prompt.  None of this was helpful, since this machine will not be running RAID.  I was surprised that this motherboard apparently expects to be installed on a system with a floppy drive - this was not mentioned in any system prerequisites that I had seen.  I had no idea what the DOS prompt menu item was for.  I eventually realized that the system must have booted from the CD, pulled it and pressed Control-Alt-Delete.

The Realtek High Definition Audio driver took forever to install.  I eventually cancelled the installation, without knowing if it worked or not.  I then cancelled InstAll and installed the remainder of the drivers one by one without incident.

I then opened the Utilities tab of the ASUS driver disk:

... and installed the following:

• Marvel Yukon Virtual Cable Tester (VCT) program
• ASUS PC Probe II (monitors fan speed, voltage and CPU temperature)

PC Probe

PC Probe is a half-finished program.  It displays the motherboard's serial number as 0123456789 (quite incorrectly), and some of the panels just show an error message.

ASUS Update

This program is supposed to download and flash the BIOS.  Sounds a whole lot better than floppies! The default site (ftp.asus.com.tw) did not work, but the other site (dlsvr01.asus.com) did the job. I updated the BIOS to v1407 without incident and rebooted.

ASUS Ai Booster

Overclocking utility.  This little bugger runs every time the computer boots.  I only got rid of it by running TweakUI.  Here is what it displayed before I touched anything:

Clicking on the wrench shows the utility menu:

The Ai Booster manual provides a limited understanding what the controls are for, but does not help the reader learn how to use it. The manual should have been included on the CD.

HP Deskjet 3845 Printer

I had to download the latest HP 3845 printer drivers before they would install.