Freezes then restarts

Hi,
I am working on an older Aopen tower for a friend. I picked it up along w/ some other PC stuff from an PC tech who was moving away. I think it is a P3 800mhz. I have tried to install both XP and Ubuntu. It will install about half way but after it reboots it won't finish installing. It hangs and then keeps rebooting. It will flash a blue screen but reboots so fast I can't catch the error code. I tried a different hard drive and then swapped out the Ram. Still does the same thing. My friend is a single mother going back to school and she can't afford to by a computer right now. I would really like to get this going for her but I am completely stumped. Thanks for any advice you can give me.

Lisa

 

It's quite possible that it's the power supply. That's generally what would cause a system to randomly reboot.

 

Would also check for bad caps

It could also be overheating.

http://forum.videohelp.com/images/guides/p2022092/close-up.jpg

 

I hadn't thought about the power supply. That's about the only part I have never installed. That along w/ a motherboard. I am basically learning as I go along.

I don't think it has any bad caps unless I overlooked some. I did check.

I put in 2 128mb sticks. It came w/ 1 128mb stick.. I didn't want to try to put too much in because I can't scan it to see how much it will hold.

Thanks for the feedback guys!

Lisa

 

Try it with only one stick of memory in it. If there was an issue with one of the sticks, it could cause strange things like this to happen. XP only needs 64mb of memory as a minimum system requirement.

 

I thought about the memory early on. It only had one stick in it. I ordered the two 128mb sticks of ebay. Since it is PC133 I couldn't find new memory but they were supposed to have been tested. And the seller had a really good rating. Thanks.

Lisa