So, I bought a case with an integrated motherboard. Bought a Radeon VGA card, 2GB Corsair DDR2 RAM, a 160GB Western Digital Hard-drive, AMD X2 2.02GhZ processor, a litescribe DVD-R drive and a widescreen 19" monitor. With Windows Media Center, of course, since I could upgrade to Vista if I wanted to for only 20 dollars.

So, I plug everything together and assemble everything together (I was being helped by a guy who had assembled computers before), and after it's all put together, I plug it in, and put the Media Center CD in, and I switch the computer on.

It does everything normally. Asks me if I want to format the hard drive. So I say yes. It takes about half an hour to format it, and then it goes to town on copying files over and shit.

And then, after it's done copying from the first CD, it restarts, goes through the XP screen and just freezes on a light blue screen. I was nonplussed, so I restarted it (the guy told me to).

Then, it did, went beyond the light blue screen part and said that it had finished copying files, and needed to do the fourth thing on the list (don't remember what). This is all going pretty slowly. The XP screen, the black screen with the cursor and the motherboard screen take a long time to pass. At this point, it freezes again, so I restart again.

Now, whatever I do, it won't get beyond the light blue screen. I even tried doing another quick format, another long format and then putting the first CD in to install Windows again, but it won't even get beyond the copying files phase. It just freezes at 2%. I've tried booting from CD too.

I even switched the HDD into my friend's computer and tried to format and install windows there, since his computer definitely works, but there was the same problem. I even ran CHKDSK, but of no avail (other than the fact that it said it fixed some errors).

Any pointers or help on what the problem might be? I could probably answer any other questions you guys have.

Thanks!

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Stuffed potato sandwich perturbation maneuver.