Please read ALL post to prevent useless reponses please ->

I just spent £300+ on upgrades, one of which is the ECS KN1 Extreme SKT939 motherboard, if you want a link to the product from ebuyer + all specs try this;

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products … _uid=94495

Stock is overdue, so hopefully i won't need to send it back

After putting the mobo in, and setting everything up (its all corrected properly so forget that) i attempted to install XP Pro

Took a while sorting out the boot procedures but it was all good, i booted into the XP setup, getting past the bog standard questions (ie do you want to install RAID drivers etc) and it started copying files across.

When it got to the actual install part it crashed out into Blue Screen telling me my BIOS was not ACPI (i think, try any combination of those) compatible and that i should contact my venodr and update it. I tried to update it from the site, and of course the only way of doing that is through windows itself (the program runs off the windows c***)

BUT it gave me the option to hit F7 to skip that side and enter the setup normally, i tried this and got a bit furthur, copying the files across. It then said that several .dll files could not be copied across because of some weird error i didn't understand, it basically blamed the copy of XP i have.

I have got 2 copies, so i tried the other copy and it gave me the same problem with different dll files. (thisa time stopping towards the 'm' ones, whereas before it was 'w')

I am about to attmept a Linux install, and i hope this will all run smoothly. If it does, i may try to update BIOS through that, but i can't seriously think how it will.

If there are any suggestions you have it would be much appreciated, i can't stress enough how c*** i feel after 4 hours busilly being happy to find that none of it works.

As a quick run down of what io have stuck into pc;

AMD 64bit 3200+ Venice
approx 1256mb of RAM
ECS KN1 Extreme SKT939 mobo
Sapphire Radeon 256mb x800 GTO2
Creative Audigy SE 7.1 card
Seagate 8mb cache 120gb IDE HDD

Thankyou in advance

ACPI is a power management setting. You can normally change that setting in the BIOS so it doesn't matter that Windows isn't fully installed yet. As soon as the PC switches on, hit the appropriate key on the keyboard (usually F2 or Del) to enter the BIOS. Switch ACPI on, save and exit. Try the Windows install again (format the partition again to wipe off the half-installed stuff that's already on it).

Let us know how you get on