Okay, my roommate has a little bit of an outdated computer. It had a 20 gig HD, ASUS mobo and Geforce2 card. There was an issue (BSOD) at startup and occasionally the comp was not even recognizing the hard drive. Doing a repair install of the OS is my first thought. My roommate decided since the comp wasnt recognizing the HD every time, why not just get a new one and be done with it. We got the new HD a 120GB Maxtor 7200rpm from CompUSA and installed it. Here is where my problem lies: Installing XP was verrryy slow. It took over 12 hours for the computer to complete the installation. Now the computer is trying to boot up. I estimate it will take about an hour to see any form of a desktop. I think the processor is at fault, but it wasnt acting this way before the new HD was installed. grrrr....help me -Cyclone Real Friends Stab You in the Front

A little bit outdated dosen't tell us anything except that it is old. Is the ram that you posted in the heading the ram from that computer or the ram on the computer you used to post the message with. Did you enable LBA in the system bios when you installed the new drive? Sorry but I need a little more info as to what you have there. IN THE MATTERS OF STYLE, swim with the current; in matters of principle, STAND LIKE A ROCK

you shouldn't add/change hardware when there's a problem. Now we could possibly have two problems. What did the BSOD say? If you just snip out the 2nd half of your post (about the new hard drive), I'd guess that there might be a problem with the motherboard. You say it's outdated, maybe the bios/cmos battery was dying before. Adding the new hard drive introduces new problems. Is it jumpered correctly? master/slave? How are they arranged on the ide channels? Is the IDE cable good, or has it gone bad?