Well, I got the stuff. But no dice. Everything went together apparently with no problems. It was tricky to get the heat sink attached, but a little patience and I prevailed. (The last time I did this was with a Pentium 4; it snapped on much more easily.) So by this morning after breakfast I had the case assembled with motherboard, CPU, RAM, virgin 40GB Maxtor hard drive, CD-RW, 512MB PNY RAM.
No dice, though. To all accounts everything worked fine--it POSTs fine, will boot up to floppy or CD-ROM, etc. But it crashes out halfway thru installation of Winblows 98. Or sooner--I tried several times. The plan is for Red Hat to go on the second hard drive (not yet installed--still in the old computer with all our docs & apps till the new unit is working). So, I threw in the Red Hat 9 install CD, and it choked about halfway through the first CD worth of packages. The error was something like "The X server is no longer available, I'm not sure why".
So. Seems to me that barring a spectacularly weird problem with the hard drive that's not found by scandisk, it's the motherboard or the memory. I'm gonna try to pick up another piec of memory tonight & test it. Any other suggestions? Any good way to really test memory besides just throwing it in and seeing if it crashes? (I checked download.com for burn-in tests, but the ones that looked useful in terms of their features required Windows.
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