I have a really old laptop that was running windows 98.

I took this apart and installed a 40gb hard drive to replace its 6gb ready for a fresh UBUNTU install.

When i went to install Ubuntu 8 it hangs forever on this screen...
'[ 0.000000] ACPI: DMI BIOS year==0, assuming ACPI-capable machine

I have searched this problem and tried adding ACPI=off at the end of the boot options but no luck, instead it will just go to a blank screen.

I tried booting up another live cd i own called mini-PE... It got to the desktop but returned an error about the isaac.exe really quickly then restarted?

I think it might be a RAM problem but as far as i know this laptop has soldered RAM..

Is this the end of my old laptop? I would really like to have a little unix machine running !

An update, i tried with Ubuntu 7.10 and got this error :

Kernel Panic - not syncing : Attempted to kill the idle task!

Ive just had a thought... Could it be because i only have 32mb of RAM available?

I'd say yes. Linux doesn't require RAM as much as Vista does, but it still needs 128-256, especially if your distribution is new. I don't think Ubuntu will ever run on that machine if you don't add more RAM.

I suggest you get more RAM (with 128MB you can run DSL (Damn Small Linux) at full speed, according to their website).

i tried Damn small linux but the laptop just restarts after i press enter?!
also tried slax with no luck... what could be wrong? im currently running memtest from the slax cd i made ill post back with results.