New computer is super slow

Hi everyone - hope someone can help.

I just built a new system with the following:
Biostar K8M800 Micro AM2 motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 x2 dual core processor
ATI Radeon X1650 Pro
PNY Optima DDR Memory (2 x 1 gig chips)
Western Digital Caviar SE 320 gig EIDE HD 7200/8MB/ATA100
Soundblaster Audigy SE
Standard 48x CDRom (first tried Liteon DVD RW but Windows wouldn't install so I changed it for now)
450W power supply
Acer monitor

Everything went together ok but when I tried to install windows xp using the Liteon drive I kept getting error messages so I pulled that and put an old 48x standard CDRom in and windows installed ok.

System booted but took forever to load - about 7-8 minutes. I figured ok, it's a new install - may be slow the first time. But the system continues to run incredibly slow. Still takes that long to boot and once it's loaded, it runs at about the speed of a 300 mhz system both in general and on the internet (cable modem connection that normally is very fast). I tried downloading updates at Windows thinking that might help but it did not. There were 79 updates and Microsoft's site said it would take about 1 1/2 hours on a cable modem - it took more than 7 hours to download and install.

I also am unable to install the video card drivers. I get a general error message that just says there's a problem and try to install a standard VGA driver first but that does nothing. (I was able to install the drivers for the APG from the motherboard disk with no problem).

Anyone have any ideas where to start?

Gail

You never said that you installed the mobo drivers. I assume you did. Check hardware manager for any exclamation points etc. Download CPU-Z and check it for proper CPU speed etc.

Just curious, is your RAM at least DDR2 800? AM2 setups need DDR2 800 ram at the very least to reach their potential (Very memory sensitive), on top of that you seem to have a generic PSU and I would not discard problems with that either. Even if your ram is DDR2 800, I suggest you run memtest for a few hours like deuce said.

Good catch, that has to be a typo.

They do not lie, they are just screwing you. Simply put. The same as Dell and any other OEM do, they are COMPLETELY aware that AMD cpus are very memory sensitive (Need DDR2 800 to perform properly), but they keep putting budget PCs with AMD cpus and DDR2 667 ram.

That's why you won't find many mobos other than the extreme cheapos (AM2 mobos that is) that won't take DDR2 800 ram.

Oh yeah! YES there is a performance hit from using PC5300 instead of PC6400, but its not nearly enough to be causing the kind of performance drain you are talking about. There should be a Toms article you can look up where they did a comparison, but off the top of my head I can't imagine it could be more than about a 10% penalty. I'd possibly try to test if it could be the hard drive since your symptoms state that everything loads slowly. Use a tool like Everest to check for SMART errors. You can also use Everest to check your CPU stats but the free version might have that stripped down. A lot of people use CPU-Z.

Make sure that you have UDMA enabled.
Check it in system hardware / device manager/ IDE controllers/ prpperties/ Advanced