I have a bad system. It starts with a poor motherboard, pcChips m599lmr v1.4 running k6-2/450 MHz with 256mb pc100 memory. The BIOS is not the latest. The rom chip has a 50/50 chance of being a write only. A manufacture mistake not worth the chance to flash. My brand OS is SuSE 9.3 with gnome.

The system reboots or hangs during start up. If I do log in, it freezes a few minutes into the desktop. My googles have turned up nothing of help. I have played with the BIOS settings, switched mem sticks around and reinstalled the OS. My knowledge of Linux grows, just not fast enough.

What now?

Get a DSL live cd (or knoppix) and use memtest (before distro even boot)
to check the memory is ok (cannot remember for sure which linux cd distro boot has memtest in it)

Try vector linux
Consider mandriva because you can use light desktop like icewm
(for you hardware that would be my choice)