I'm willing to bet that the mobo is not compatible with the o/s.
I've had personal experience with such an issue.  I had a machine
that would run Windows98 just fine.  But would not upgrade to
Windows2000.
Try loading Win98 to see if it will.

Good luck.
William

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Russ Cox" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, May 08, 2007 11:58 AM
Subject: [PCBUILD] Failure pattern


I was given a no name computer, 1 GHz Duron, 256M RAM running XP Home. There
are no expansion cards installed. System and CPU fans are running.
 It would lock up at about the same point loading Win XP, would not go into
setup, would fail at the same point in safe mode every time.  I changed
memory with no improvement.  So I decided to load a fresh copy of Win XP
Home.  It locks up at about the same point each time while installing files
during installation.
So where is the problem?

                         PCBUILD's List Owners:
                      Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]>
                       Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>

                         PCBUILD's List Owners:
                      Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]>
                       Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>