Brand new computer having major problems

[nmuxfpaxn]

For Christmas my brother recieved some money that he spent on buying a new computer. He ordered all of the parts that he needed off of the internet with the help of one of his friends and after it arrived I helped him assemble everything. This is where the problems start. Before I get to specific problems, I'm sure it would help if you knew the specs so here they are:

Motherboard: ASUS A7N8X-E
CU: AMD Athlon 2700+
Memory: Kingston 512MB DDR 3200 (1 stick)
Hard Disk: Seagate 80 gig HD (now)
VGA: AGP MSI nVidia NX6800 GT 256MB
OS: Windows XP
Networked: No

Ok, so there they are. Now for the problems. Each time I would try to load windows on the machine it would hang as the motherboard checked everything. I tried disabling certain things but it would still hang until i disabled the HD. This is when it went fairly quickly, so I thought perhaps I should replace the HD. I replaced the HD and loaded windows which took, literally, 5 hours. I have reformatted many-a computer and it has never taken half of that before. This is where I began to get a little suspicious, to say the least. My brother allowed it to run through the night and windows was finally installed. We installed all of the drivers for the Video Card and MB and then restarted. It seems that windows now hangs right after it displays the windows logo and will eventually load windows, however, it takes quite a bit of time and even when it does, it will run horribly. Any ideas?

As of now, all of the latest MSI and Nvidia drivers have been installed (again) as well as the ASUS MB drivers. As it stands, it takes approximately 15 minutes for the computer to boot up and load everything that needs to be loaded (auto-launch stuff, etc). This is on a clean install of windows, so there really isn't much it needs to load.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this and have a happy new year

NUFAN

 

[vegasgmc]

You said the computer would hang. Any error messages? Have you tried clearing the CMOS? It sounds like you may have a faulty motherboard or RAM. Since disabling the HD helped that could mean there is a problem with the motherboards IDE controller. Check Simmtester.com and Memtest86.com.

 

[nmuxfpaxn]

Thank you so much for the help. The problem with the old HD was that when it finally would make it to the point where I could partition the HD using windows, it would only detect 8 of the 80 gigs on the HD. I chalked this up to a bad HD and continued, which fixed THAT problem, but as I've said it's really really slow now. I'm not getting any error messages off of it and on the windows help site it says that perhaps a hang where I'm getting one is due to an incompatible video driver, but I can't see this being the problem. I will check out the MB and RAM with those sites to see if they are indeed the problem. If anything else comes to mind at all please don't hesitate to post. At this point i'm willing to try anything short of a gun

thanks again for your help!

NUFAN