Hi there vroman,
Firstly, welcome to
CompuForums. I hope that you can visit our forum often in the future and post - rather than just receiving our help and advice, and then never visiting again. We provide our help for free, and all we ask in return is that you participate in our forum and refer your friends, or consider a premium membership. Not giving back to the community is like stealing - we provide our time for free and hope to have some of yours spent on the site in return.
Has the OEM copy of XP been installed on any other computer before?
What Keith has told you is pretty much the easiest way - but there are some newer computers that the manufacturers have tried to make it difficult to install XP on. If you provide us with your computer make and model, we can provide more specific instructions.