cpu acknowledgement => screen blanks
 

i usually have no problem w/ my hardware, but i recently got a gateway pentium III 800 from one of my friends and it has a really odd problem on bootup of (as far as i can tell) ANY operating system.

when i first booted this computer, i tried booting into the resident operating system (windows 2k) to see if the hardware was working, but once the thing said "loading windows," it stopped outputting to the screen and kept on cranking the hard drive, etc. (it went into powersaving mode). so it loaded the bios fine, counted ram, acknowledged that it had a pentium III 800 chip, and then checked IDE assignments. this makes me think that the processor, ram and mobo are working, but it gets more interesting.

initially, i suspected that win 2k was responsible, but when i put in a bootdisk (bare.i kernel), it allows me to boot the kernel and then it blanks out the screen when the usual message "stepping CPU voltage... blah bogomips, etc." appears. the timing of this makes me suspect that something's wrong with the processor/mobo, even though the bios seems to work fine.

additionally, the computer doesn't seem to boot the slackware installation cd, so that's why i have to use a bootdisk.

things i haven't tried yet:

1) clearing the CMOS (in case it's a bios issue, as gateway has funny bios)

2) checking that the video card works in another computer (but it outputs the bios, etc. just fine...)

3) smashing the computer as a tribute to the capitalist gods of the state (illinois in this case) in hopes of receiving something else (J/K)

any suggestions are welcome

thx for reading,
y-p