First time poster with a bit of a headache. A friend gave me a P3 933 chip out of a Dell that she was having problems with. She had to replace the mobo but they sent her an extra cpu as part of troubleshooting process. I tested both chips in the new board and they both seemed to work.

I bought an Asus CUV266 on the web and set about upgrading my secondary machine. I ran into a whole host of problems. To make a very long story short, I have the Mobo installed in an Elan Vital case with a 250 watt Powersupply and 256 DDR installed. the HD is clean and ready for Windows. I have an old Diamond Monster Fusion Video card, but am not yet at the point where drivers are installed. For that matter, I don't have the mobo drivers installed either. 56x CD Rom and floppy are the only other things hooked up, besides mouse and keyboard.

When I boot the machine up, it gets me to the DOS prompt and, after a couple of minutes, it locks up. I can run a Directory seach and change from drive to drive, but I think the locking is a timing issue rather than something I am doing. Also, while the Statup disk installs the CD ROM drivers, I cannot do a DIR on the CD - tells me cannot read Drive.

I was wondering if I need a better power supply. Could that be causing the lockup? Also, I have not had the opportunity to upgrade BIOS. Do you think that would help? Aside from those thoughts, I'm starting to think that either the CPU is shot or the mobo is defective.

Any ideas? (Sorry for the long post)