:) well don't ask me what happened but I stripped everything out, and tried the hd in another (very old) box.. the hard drive booted up... so I then powered up the my KT400 and things looked good, i.e. the cpu fan was spinning... :) so.... now I'm doing another fresh install... I think when I plugged in the hard drive into the other machine it tried to configure to that graphics card and so the quickest way for me to try and see whether the sys is operable is to try out another install... I don't know how to manually config a graphics card etc... It might of been in my abruptness that I plugged the ide leads into the wrong slots initially... actually the last time the pc was screaching I unplugged the hard drive, cd rom and cd burner... then to still hear the screaching which lead(s) me to believe it is the power supply (and left me panicing when I couldn't then reboot)... I was going to quickly buy a new power supply... but if my pc gets up and running again I think I'll save a few bucks and wait for the postman... I did previously try to a get cpu fan but I chose the wrong one, i.e. it wouldn't fit... so I may try a new one of those as well... the problem with ewiz.com is that you get what you choose, and pictures (etc) can be deceiving especially if your not in the know... So seeing that when I tried the install it saw my 512MB of memory and the mere fact that I'm seeing images on the screen must mean (fingers crossed) nothing got burnt... Fingers crossed.... I just can't face a crash during mission critical stuff etc... G.