Thanks to everyone here, I just finished building my 1st puter. To anyone that is hesitant, I say do it. It wasn't bad at all. I basically removed my old mobo, power supply, etc from the case, cleaned the case up and installed the new mobo/cpu/ram, and PS. It took me a coupe hours to do that part. I was pretty darn nervous when I was ready to power up, but the "Asus p4p800" flash screen followed by the Bios settings screen told me all was good thus far. I was a little confused about the winXP pro installation because when I tried a reset with the XP cd in the drive, my old win98 kept loading to the flash screen then locking up. I had remembered someone here said to change the boot sequence in Bios to load the CD rom drive 1st, which is what I did. After changing that, no problems. WinXp installed flawlessly. Phew! All in all it took me about 4 hours to do the whole thing, in front of the TV too. Thanks guys for answering my most basic questions. I'm sure I'll have more soon. I think I'll start loading my other drivers and software tonite. BTW, what an improvement thus far from my old system. The speed alone is very noticeable ( i used to have a t-bird 900mhz with a7v133a mb).