I have been using the unattend process I developed (with the help of this site, of course) and all is generally well. I use this process to install xp on a variety of desktop platforms....Dell GX260's, HP d530's, Comapq Evo's, etc... On all other systems the "Preparing Installation" phase maybe takes 10-15 minutes.....but on the Evo it takes much much longer. It eventually chugs its way thru and machine is built correctly. Any thought on why only these types of systems would be slower than the rest? Thanks in advance