I recently purchased components for a new system from Newegg.com.

AMD Athlon 64 3000 1.8 ghz socket 939
MSI K8N Neo 4 motherboard
Gigabyte's Radeon X700 Pro videocard
512 Corsair DDR PC3200 ram
WD 80 Gig Harddrive

Issues after all the hardware were pieced together.

1. There were all sorts of characters when i first booted the system.  I figure it's the video card.  So i took out the Radeon X700 and plugged in a regular PCI oldie from my cousin.  The screen cleared up.  Since i don't know anyone that has a motherboard whic supports PCI express 16 for the Radeon X700, don't know if it's 100% video card issue or motherboard.  Not 100% resolved.

2.  After the Harddrive was formatted, windows started to install but stop quarter of a way through with the following error.

"The file xxx.dll was not copied correctly.  The file setup placed on your harddrive is not a valid windows XP system image.  If you are installing from a cd, there may be a problem with the windows xp cd."

I tried 3 different OSs, Win 2000 and 2 different versions of XP but same problem.  It's possible that my CDs are no good but i tried them on a different system and it installed fine.  Also eliminated the possible hardware problem with my DVD-rom by using an old CD-R drive, same problem.

I'm stump for now since many of my friends have oldier system and i can't test the other hardware to eliminate other possibilities such as CPU, motherboard or ram problems.

Can anyone out there offer me advice and help?  It will be greatly appreciated.  Thank you!!!

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