I don't think memory is a problem with the desk top. I believe it was running 1 or 2 mb of Ram. It has a 60 gb hard drive.

In the next few days I will pull the fan off the cpu and find out what it actually is. Over the years, it was UP graded a few times but this was the original machine 10 years ago and the current config is more powerful.

The original purchase was 2002-12-27 and was a Athlon XP 2000+ (1.86MHz) and MSI KT4VL mainboard.
and MSI GF4 MX440-VTP 64MB DDR video card, The soundblaster is you sound card.

Chris

Seems to me that that original video card is no longer the one in the system. It popped and had a cascading affect and took out the mother board with it. I will try to have a look this evening at the existing video card. I think it is of the same manufacturer but a better model. I will check. Thanks so far to everyone.

Chris....

Ok, for sound; Creative emu1ok1-JFF Creative Tech 97

For video; Radeon 9550, 256 MB DDR 128 bit.

Hope this helps. I'm really hoping to be able to run Ubuntu 12.04 but if the machine is not up to snuff I guess I will have to look at Lubuntu. Everything in it seems to be a compromise though, or does lite not mean (kinda crippled)?

Chris

Last minute addition here. Once I receive that unrecoverable error message the desk top loads. Once it is loaded I have not found anything yet that does not work so It appears the system is capable. Yes no?