I foolishly offered to build a computer for a family friend, and it's not going so well. I got him a Shuttle SN27P2, Athlon 5000+, 2GB of Corsair RAM, ATI X1650XT graphics card, and Western Digital drive (among other stuff, but I figured that was all that's pertinent). After putting it all together, I have two problems:

Infrequent bootup success rate

This is a little troubling. I press the power button, fans start whirring, the LEDs on the front are lighting up fine, the hard drives seem to be spinning, the video card fan is spinning, everything looks right...but no video. The monitor shows that it's not getting a signal. I also get the sense that it's not merely a video problem, but that the machine isn't even getting to the POST. Every time, I'm able to press the power button to turn it off. But every 4th-6th try (or so), I'll get the POST, the machine will boot up, and run normally until the next reboot when I go through it all over again. Could the problem just be that I have an old CRT hooked up via DVI-VGA adapter?

Windows only "half-installs"

This one is tough to explain. I've now installed an official, licensed (though OEM) copy of XP Pro on this machine three times, and each time has been exactly the same. I get to the graphical installation screen, past the "regions and dialects" part, and suddenly the install asks for the Windows SP2 disks. WTF? SP2 is supposed to be included in the one disc (it says so on the disc its self). But still, it asks for me to point it to the location of the disc. I keep trying to point it in the right direction, but it refuses to do anything. It gives me a browse option, but it can't seem to see any files/folders in any drive it points me to (and the icons for all the drives are blank - just a white space). So I cancel it, as well as a couple more dialogs asking for the same thing. Then, when I finally get into the "installed" Windows, I have a flawed installation. Tons of stuff is missing, networking isn't installed, and the OS keeps giving me errors if I try to install any other stuff from the XP CD (like, oh, networking!).

Can anyone help? I'm sort of freaking out here. I don't want to screw this machine up and have to send stuff back.


ps-I'm a little disappointed in Shuttle - this system was not very easy to get stuff into. The power/data cables for the hard drives have to be contorted in the worst way. The video card needs to be wrestled into place juuust so. Worst of all, there was a screw for the expansion slot machanism on the back that was so tightened on (by a machine, I assume), even though I applied a great amount of pressure, I completely stripped the head. I had to use quite a bit of strength and needlenose pliers to get it out. I hope nobody nearby heard the cursing this machine has brought forth from me...