Ok, here goes. I cant get my computer working. Its been months ive stumped all my friends and i dont want to spend any more money dealing with proffesional repair centers. If anyone can help me, i would be very grateful. It all started with a simple upgrade. I got all new parts, took the old ones out and put the new ones into the same case. Several weeks later i bought another case and tried to put the old one back together. Here is where my troubles began. First, it wouldnt even turn on. I soon found out that the motherboard was contacting the case somewhere. So i got a new power supply, motherboard and processor. Put those in and it turned on fine. Then i tried installing windows xp. I get blue screen of death. it reads IRQL not less or equal. Ive read this might have to do with bad RAM. ive tried it with 2 different sets of RAM, does same thing. I bought a new hard drive and tried different copies of windows. nothing. i even put the old motherboard and processor back in, (turned out the power supply was the only thing that had broken) and it hangs on "setup is inspecting hardware configuration" so i dont even get far enough for blue screen. The only thing i tried that produced results was this. I popped in a hard drive with windows 98 on it and it booted perfectly. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?????? im out of ideas please please please. Some out there help me. These my specs: motherboard 1- k8n neo v2 (blue screen)
motherboard 2- k8t neo v2 (setup inspecting hardware)
processor 1 - athelon 64 socket754 (blue screen)
processor 2 - athelon 64 socket775(inspecting hardware)
video card - geforce 6800

Hello elf, w'll do our best to help you out. Well, i would like to blame it on the fact that they are MSI motherboards. For the first board, i foudn this. eBabble MSI K8N Neo-FSR
The 2nd one, appears to have a VIA chipset. That right there, coupled with the fact its a MSI board, spell trouble to me. But lets see what we can do. That processor you bought for the MSI K8T Neo, is it dual core?

My sincerest thanks for responding so quickly! Ive looked over he link you sent me and from what i could see, the solution it suggests is flashing the BIOS. Ive never attempted that and i tried finding BIOS updates but i have no idea which is the correct one. Im going to meet with me friend this week and he said he might be able to do it. Anyway, my processors are not dual core, AMD athelon64. Do you think if i just bought a different motherboard this would still happen or would i be wasting more money?

ok try booting one machine outside of the case use a screw driver to short the power switch pins. Work in sequence. motherboard cpu 1 stick of ram gfx see if it posts if it does add a cd/dvd drive and run memtest to test the ram.If it does not try a different stick of ram and so on. If at any point it posts and passes memtest add a hdd to the equation.

If it does not post repeat tests with different mobo and cpu. If all still fails that leaves gfx and psu. Try to beg borrow or steal a different gfx/psu and run tests again

I would recommend switching motherboards, yes. In all likelihood, this would fix your problem. But first, do you have another graphics card/sound card you can try to make sure they arent the problem?