Keeps freezing on boot up aaarrrggghhhh HELP please

Ok here goes....
My mate has an old TINY pc nothing fancy obviously :-D
When he was using it, it would just keep freezing and takin hours to load up (literally) so i said to him ill wipe it clean and put vista on it to which i set about!
Formatted the drive and all partitions and started a fresh!
Got half way through setup and froze...
Tried again same thing! And again and again and again... Ya get the picture yeah.
It does have the minimum requirements to run it i checked. so....
Thought bugger it ill go back to XP. Sure enough same problem so i thought the drive might be corrupt took it out scanned it in mine no problem!
Tried formatting it on mine putting it back in only to have the same problem.
Put it back in mine and installed a fresh copy of vista with no problems so its not the drive at fault, put it back in his and will only boot as far as the XP logo and freezes grrr.
Tried different memory sticks only to have the same problem tried removing all unnecessary hardware to no avail.... :confused
HEEEEEEELLLLLLPPPPPP!!!!!!!

Anyone shed some light on what this might be dont wanna tell the guy to go buy stuff for it to be something else could it be the CPU or power supply??

Any help would be massively appreciated

 

I would try running Memtest and check disk on his machine( to get a true reading) and see if you get any errors

Sounds like Ram or hdd failure or maybe a controller.
If its one of these Memtest and check disk should know
Also if check disk and memtest give you no errors try a long format and see if it makes it through the processes (check disk is not perfect)

http://majorgeeks.com/MemTest_d350.html

 

Is there some reason you are choosing to not share this information with us .... ?
If you wish to receive meaningful assistance, please provide full details of the system on which you are trying to install Vista or XP.

Which is it .... Vista or XP?