I put this in the OS section, hoping I will get more responses here:

I have just built a new machine MSI MOBO, AMD sempron 64 3000+, 1 GB RAM, the MOBO has onboard GFX and it has a SATA HDD.

The initial boot is fine, I get the blue screen when win xp starts to install.

When I get to the press f6 if you want to install 3rd party drivers (which I want to do) the install process stops (whether I hit f6 or not).

Any ideas what may be causing this, I have checked all connections, I am thinking maybe faulty ram, but have not been able to swap it out yet.

Any ideas gratefully received

I would try booting a "Live CD' and trying to run tests on your system to see if you can isolate a problem.

You can use something like Damn Small Linux (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/) or a Windows PE disk (http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/).

Also - Is your XP Home CD a "vanilla" off the shelf one, or an OEM version from an old computer? Many OEM disks are customized specifically from the hardware manufacturer and don't work reliably with unknown hardware.

Thanks for your suggestion, I will try linus, although I have never used it before, and it is a "vanilla" version of xp as you put it, bought it from aria with the componants so it is as Microsoft intended it to be.

I am going to start swaping out the componants with some from my machine, the only problem is, is I don't have a 64 bit cpu to try with it, so I cannot test the CPU or MOBO, but I can check the MEM, HDD and DVDRW, if not I guess it will be a fault with the CPU or MOBO.

I will get back to you with my findings,