Can't install Vista

Hey, I've tried searching for the last 30 minutes and haven't found a solution to my problem. I received my new Inspiron 1720 on Wednesday, and was having really sluggish performance so I decided to reformat.

I put in my Vista Home Premium reinstallation DVD and rebooted, and formatted the hard drive in the setup menu but the install always gets stuck on either Completing Installation, or it goes past that to a black screen with the mouse cursor still showing. If I try to restart the machine at the black screen, Windows will not boot and it just shows the loading bar infinitely.

I tried re-seating both RAM sticks and re-seating the Hard Drive, also there are no external devices or anything plugged into the machine except the power cable. If anyone could help me I'd greatly appreciate it, this is driving me up the wall and like I said I only got this machine on Wednesday so this is quite upsetting. When Windows was on originally, I had really long load times, a lot of "stutter" in games, no errors or anything like that so I am thinking it's a faulty hard drive possibly.

Also just on the desktop, everything was slow to load up but I thought this was due to the amount of bloatware and such, this is why I decided to reformat in the first place. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me. Cheers.

I just tried my retail Vista DVD, it installed just fine with no freezes or anything BUT, at first boot I got a BSOD while loading but couldn't see the error because it justs reboots right away. Could a faulty HDD cause this?

One of the sticks of ram was different to the other, so I took that one out. Booted fine, no BSOD so I guess it was either from the RAM being faulty or incompatible. Going to try the other DVD now to make sure.

Also thank you for your help.

Hmm.. I still get stuck on the black screen with the mouse cursor with the OEM Vista DVD, really unsure of what's going on here now.

Update:

I re-installed using the retail DVD again, I am now getting the BSOD on boot again.. I'm thinking it really is the HDD maybe.

Yeah, tried that. Not sure why one Vista DVD works and the other doesn't though, very strange.

I'm getting new RAM either today or next week anyway so, I'll wait until that comes before I ring Dell.

Okay the memory test came out all clean. By the way, I am able to get around the BSOD on boot if I power down the system, if I just restart without shutting it down entirely, I get the BSOD still.

The HDD is testing right now but it's going to take a while, I'll post back when I have the results.