First....here's the system specs: AMD Athlon XP 2200+ Asus A7V333 KT333(w/o RAID) 768MB OCZ Tech PC-2700 DDR PNY Verto GeForce4 Ti4600 Western Digital 120GB SE w/8MB cache Lite-On 40X/12X/48X CDRW Lite-On 16X DVD All devices are recognized by BIOS, and WinXP setup loads, but is TERRIBLY laggy. Can get as far as creating the partition, but the format hangs at 0% and goes no further...any ideas on how to fix this? (Also tried Win2k and that failed also at the format)

Its a win XP thing, you need to get all XP specific drivers. I had same problem. I'll bet your using USB laser mouse. be sure to have XP driver for that too. doing this fixed my XP problem. check that the system reconizes all hardware and has correct speeds and ratings down, if not grab a new driver for it

I would these steps to make sure your hard drive is not the problem. First use a ps2 keyboard and ps2 mouse Second make sure the hd is plugged into the primary ide channel as the master with no other drives on the channel (usually you have to remove the jumper from the hard drive). Then unplug the two cd drives from the motherboard. Get a dos bootdisk with fdisk and format on it and boot from a floppy with that disk Try fdisk and create a 20GB primary partition and make it active. Then try formatting that partition from dos. If this doesn't work then the problem is most likely your harddrive. At this point once that partition is formatted you can either keep the small partition to run your OS off of or you can delete it and try running the XP setup again. If you decide to keep it turn the computer off. Plug the CD drives back into the motherboard. Turn the computer back on booting from the floppy, you need one with CD drivers. Then from the floppy run the winnt file that is in a folder called I384 or I394 on the Windows xp disk. This should launch the XP setup.

I have the same board and this is what I did. 1) Disable RAID, and FIREWIRE 2)on the left of the AGP Port are 2 undocumented Jumpers, Set them both to 1-2. 3)Disable USB on the BIOS. Good luck, or IM me at saintseiya66 on AIM.

I have the version of this motherboard with RAID, so I don't know how Asus ships the ones without Raid, but I would think that they would either not even have the Raid and firewire jumpers or come disabled.