Having stability/boot problems with A7M266, please help

[Morden]

Hi all, first of all i'll give the specs of my rig.
ASUS A7M266 mobo with onboard sound but not lan.
1.2Ghz AXIA THUNDERBIRD
256mb of CRUCIAL PC-2100 DDR RAM
SB Vibra 128 PCI (wanted a live but they were out )
RIVA TNT2 ULTRA 32MB
SONY CD-RW 10x
6gb Quantam Fireball 5200rpm hdd
Realitek based cheap network card

all i've modified in the bios is
disabled on board audio,
modified boot sequence to a, cd, c, network
both the frequency options are set to 133mhz, this seems to work fine
i've also disabled agp 4x & fast write to see if this would fix my wierd video card startup bug (described below)

i also installed the Via 868B latency patch by George Breese, as this chip is my southbridge

i'm running win2k pro

Okay, the main problem i'm having atm is that sometimes the darned thing wont boot, i've got no idea, but sometimes when i turn it on, the fans start, and it sounds like the hdd is doing something, but no boot/init codes show up on my iPanel, the screen dosent start. Sometimes if i hit reset it works, sometimes it dosent and i have to unplug the hdd turn it on, turn it off, plug back in and go. Also sometimes during the TNT2's init screen it will only show half of its ram and if i try to boot into windows when it does this it crashes, but if i hit reset and it shows the full amount of ram it works fine.

Any assistence/tips on how to get these mobos humming along nicely would be greatly appreciated

Thanks in advance

Owen

 

[BriBe]

get a new power supply... the biggest you can afford... and check AMD's website to see if its posted as "compatible". It doesnt need to be, but unless you can check a p/s yourself in the store you never really know what you got until you got it home in your computer. Then run the ASUS probe utility, and see exactly what your p/s is doing while you are running.