Problem with barebones system

[mangled]

I bought an Asus barebones system from Fry's a week ago.

I installed a Western Digital 20gb hard drive. Athon XP 1700, and 2-128mb pc133 ram sticks. The drive and cpu were new, the ram I had left over from a previous system. I'm fairly competent in building systems as I've built several in the past.

Everything installed fine. Used the onboard video and audio and didn't install anything else. But it was upon installing the OS that my troubles began.

Started with Win98. It would not install. Got all sorts of errors while it was installing. Then blue screens. Could not finish the install. Reformat.

Then WinME. Got one error at the very end. But install worked. Booted up and all was fine. However could not use system restore at all. Wouldn't even start up right. So i install video and sound drivers. Get it hooked up to the network and begin downloading windows updates. IE crashes. Then upon installing the critical patch, blue screen. Try again, blue screen. Try installing something else, crashes. Try doing ANYTHING and it crashes. Reformat.

Then Win2k's turn. Got about halfway through copying of the setup files and it locks up. Restart. At the same point it locks again. Win2k is not gonna install. Reformat.

Put WinME back on thinking I'll just upgrade it to Win2k. Got stuck at same point in previous win2k install.

Ok, now I'm really frustrated as you can imagine. It's going back to Fry's. But what do you think is the problem? Is the barebones system? The hard drive, the RAM or the cpu? The RAM is kind of old and has been sitting around. Everything else is new. I suspect it's either the barbones system or the hard drive. So both are going back for replacements. Gonna buy new ram though.

Any thoughts?

 

[BigMoe]

are you ata cables new? try just one stick of ram in bank one,take out all cards but video. cd-rom new?

 

[Adul]

you do realize that is has a rather punny power supply in that system. Try lower the FSB to 100 Mhz and see if you can get by with the CPU sucking less juice. I have put one of those terminator systms together and I was quiet please with it. Gandma is using it happily now.

I think the max it supports for CPU speeds is 1.2 ghz. or maybe an athlon 1500+ for equivalent power draw. a 1700+ XP is just way to much to be drawing from the terminator k7. You can safely pop in a 1.2ghz duron with a little headroom left.

 

[mangled]

was using on board video. cd rom is new. it supposed to support all xp processors (at least it says so), but maybe you're right. It was also set to fsb of 100. And I was also building it for my parents.

 

[mangled]

I ended up taking the BB system and the hard drive back. Kept the cpu. Got a new Soyo BB system, a new hard drive, and new ram. Put it all together, installed WinME, and all is fine.