Need big time help with custom built PC

I just built a PC for my Dad and I'm encountering problems that I never have before. I have an MSI mobo with an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ CPU and 1stick of PC2100 128MB DDR RAM. The hard drive is a Maxtor 10GB from a Dell Optiplex. In the BIOS I pretty much have everything set to default. Anyway, I tried booting to my Windows 2000 PRO CD to do a fresh install of the OS. The CD boots up and gets to the last part where it is about to install the OS and then just stops right there. So, I gave up on the disk and I reformatted the drive to FAT32 and installed windows 98 instead. It worked, but now when I try to upgrade it to windows 2000 or even windows xp the PC will suddenly turn off. I couldn't figure it out so I put another hard drive in the PC which already has windows xp loaded on it and booted up to that drive. It booted up fine but a few minutes later the computer would just turn off. So then I thought it could be a heat problem and maybe it was shutting down because it was reaching a critical temperature, but after monitoring the heat the highest it would get was 140 degrees F. I even disabled automatic shutdown of PC in the BIOS under power management. I don't know what else to do. I've used 3 separate hard drives, 3 different OSes and it keeps turning off on me. It'll stay on for hours if the computer is idle, but once I start doing things like installing a different OS it turns off. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you very much

 

your problem is heat related. What kind of cooling do you have on the CPU?
FYI 140*F is 60*C which is hot hot hot..

 

I have a boxed CPU so the fan is the one designed for the chip. Anyway, I went to the store and picked up two 80mm fans for the case, since the case didn't have enough cooling to begin with, but the temperature did not drop. CPU was running at 141*F. I removed the manufacturer's heatsink and put in my old and loud Thermaltake Volcano 6CU+ heatsink that I had on another PC. The 7000+ RPM fan cooled it down to 127*F which made the system more stable. Now it's working great. Thanks kodo for the help. I was curious though, why would AMD ship that fan with the CPU if it doesn't cool it down properly? Anyway, thanks again for the help.

 

Why AMD does that? I gather that AMD is only giving you the bare minimum to minimize cost. But that's only my view. Who really knows for sure..