Hey, first of all, thanks to anyone who can offer help.

To begin with, I built a low cost system to upgrade my old one. I have an xp 2800+, asus a7n8x-vm/400, 512 pc 3200 samsung, samsung combo drive, wd ide 160 gig se, windows xp pro.

As for problems:

1. The main problem is the onboard graphics. When I go to load a game (in this case quake 3) it will begin to boot, load drivers then crash the system. I know it is a problem with the onboard because I have tried another vid card and it works fine. I have updated the chipset and flashed the bios...still no luck.

2. Hard drive: I have a 160 gig, the bois recognizes that. After installing windows xp, it only recognizes 130 gigs.

3. Onboard network: This thing is a pain, it says it is working, but heh, not really. It won't detect anything on the network, as far as i know I have all the settings correct (unless this piece has some "special" need). After installing a scrapped card, it works fine...but I want the onboard to work, no sense in buying something if it doesn't work.

4. Parallel port: every once in a while when I reboot, the bios will disable the parallel port, and when I go to use my printer...nothing, I have to reboot and enable the port. (I am hoping the bios flash solved this)

Thank you for your time, I am fed up with this board and am 2 seconds from putting it back in the box and sending it back. I have read all the threads on other sites possible, I am hoping someone can help.

for video try boot up get into bios
disable video shadowing
see if that works
I am not into gaming
I hear it uses a lot of memory
you may have memory problems.
networking
on board stuff can be a pain
check to see if drivers are loaded
and or problem with system chip
xp should have drivers for this already
installed? find out what chip it is.
I favor intel stuff
I gave away my trinity with the amd cpu.
good luck

Welcome to TechSpot

as to 1: go in the PCI and other settings page, check that PCI (=onboard) is your primary graphics card, not AGP (=external).

as to 2: this is a known problem with HD-limitation within XP. Use Partition Magic to make a second partition out of the rest 30GB.

as to 3 and 4: did you install the nVIDIA-drivers that came with your mobo? If not, install those. See if that solves your problem.

Aslo have a look in this A7N8X-thread:
http://www.techspot.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7934