Athlon XP & Heatsinks
I put together my Athlon XP system today, and finally got it booting. The problem ended up being exactly what Googling suggested, the Athlon won’t boot without a heatsink attached. For good reason too, WITH the heatsink (w/o thermal paste) the processor clocked in at 150+ degrees. It would boot, but I noticed various erratic errors, like kernel faults when trying to install linux off the CD. After applying the thermal grease, the CPU temperature is back down to a lower 120 degrees, and seems to have stabilized, with none of the random crashes that I was seeing earlier.