Help me Help a freind, onegaishimase

[R.Rabbit]

ok so i was feeling sad for my freind and his Gateway with 1.2 t-bird, 64megs of sdram, and Win 98 so i help him out by pulling the preexisting ram and stuck in 256meg, slightly upgraded video, and reformatted to install win2k but... it gets errors when copying file from the disc, same thing with winXP disc, so i install on my computer with his hard drive with no problems at all and everything is dandy, but when loading windows, watta you know imediate BSOD, im pretty sure its not ram.. (but i hadn't thought to put in the original ram:p:, and never got around to running memtest) and its not the optical drive giving errors when copying files, no cable troubles, flashed bios(which i cant find out how to get into if it is even possible), i've pretty much rounded it down to it being the damn gateway bios not wanting to boot with a fresh non gateway copy of windows, i know this was pretty dumn but i got a little :banana::banana::banana::banana:y, are there any hacked bioses i can use to get it all good(if there is i've had no luck finding them) or do i owe my freind a mobo, or is there and option c i haven't thought of? any advise would be greatly appreciated, he's moving soon so i'd like to fix it tommarow
thanks!!

[Karnivore]

My vote wouldn't be on bios, could be bios issues caused by ram incompatibility though.. Are you sure its not some off the wall memory requirements, Gateway and others like to do this to make sure your ugrades come from them... Another thought is the wonderfull power supplies that was included in many machines of that class. Upgraded memory, and/or video pushes the limit of the wonderfull quality supply?

Regardless should be relatively easy to troubleshoot as reversing the process should help you single out the problem/s

[docah]

Some optical drives have trouble reading non original windows disks. Some more specifics on the error message would help greatly.

[R.Rabbit]

well, my win2k disc was purchased by me completely legal thats not it...

[Boyne7]

have you checked to make sure the ram is seated correctly?
my friend had this exact same problem when ir took his comp apart and put it back together, turned out that one stick of ram was slightly unseated.