Installations do not seem to take on desktop- regardless of distro.
 

Guys,

Let me start off by saying that I am very- VERY new/green to Linux, but not to Windows-based systems. I am taking an online Intro to Linux class this semester and have been attempting to install various distro's of Linux for a while now with no luck on my desktop.

I have a self-built ATX tower that is pretty old in computer years (6): Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU, 4GB DDR2 PC2-6400 RAM, Asus P5E MoBo, Nvidia GEForce 8500 GT, and two 500GB SATA II 7200rpm hard drives, one of which I am trying to install Linux, the other has Windows 7.

Most distro's that I have tried (Ubuntu 12.04.1, openSUSE 12.2, Mint Linux 14) will display the installation menu, but when I initialize the installation, a few minutes later the display locks up, gets all garbled-up, or just doesnt display anything at all and I end up having to reset. I read that this is probably due to a memory issue, so I ran Memtest86 and THOUGHT I had bad RAM after it failed Test 7, but then found out pretty much everyone's system fails on Test 7- some kind of bug. It passed on an earlier version of Memtest86. I select the "Test Media" option after the first installation attempt fails, and of course- no problems. The fact that I installed Ubuntu on my (newer) laptop, it worked fine- no issues at all, leads me to believe that it could be old hardware giving me problems?

My latest attempt, Fedora 18, seems like it installed OK- nothing locked up. I was able to navigate through the menus, select the HDD, set up the partition sizes but when I rebooted after the install was complete, nothing happened, just a black screen with a blinking cursor. I followed the instructions from this link, and got the same result. I have read about other bugs with Fedora 18, but they didnt really sound like they applied to my situation.

I am not experienced enough to perform an install from the command line, and would definitely need supervision. Sorry this is so long-

any ideas of what I can do differently? (besides buy a new computer)

You could check this http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/ to see if its likely a HW issue.
Also, to save time, instead of actually installing on the HDD, get a LiveCD version of various distros.
These run purely off the CD, thus not affecting your HDD, but you can test the rest of the system.
NB: you have to set the BIOS to boot from the CD/DVD drive first.