OK, so, I have this nice computer case that I (embarassingly) picked up from the local rubbish dump and when I got it home and checked it out I found two DVD writers, a SATA hard drive (with data still on it which I deleted) and a working motherboard, it just had some settings wrong.
It has a socket 939 for AMD processors. I've never owned an AMD and this one was OLD but I found a dual core processor for it on ebay and installed more RAM that I had laying around and it works just fine if I use Windows XP.
It doesn't work at all with Linux.
I was able to install Linux with the windows installer but I could not load it with either of my CDs. The Ubuntu 12.04 CD would load the operating system but nothing would launch. Mozilla just gives me an error message and immediately afterwards, regardless of what I click on, it goes to a black screen and lists a few pages of errors that I can't even understand because I'm a DOS idiot and I don't understand all of Linuxe's commands.
So, do you think this is a hardware problem?
I honestly have never had a computer that Linux wouldn't run on. This is probably a simple problem with a known solution but it's completely new to me.