simple processor PC question

standing_lenticular · n00b Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 12

i am working a HP pavilion 8770C, which has an AMD Athlon 850 processor. i have always been a mac guy and don't know much about PC processors. i have tried installing gentoo and vidalinux with the x86 disks, but there are always many errors though i do get to boot and attempt to work on it for a while before it crashes.

i have seen athlon and athlon-xp versions of the install media. should i be using those instead?

tia

allydm · n00b Joined: 13 Jan 2005 Posts: 37

yes, as x86 is for more modern processors, try using the -athlon version first to establish that it will work.

hensan · l33t Joined: 26 Jun 2003 Posts: 868 Location: Sweden

Um, no, it's the other way around. x86 should work on all PC processors while athlon-xp only works on Athlon XPs. An Athlon 850 is not an Athlon XP.

In recent releases there is only one livecd for all x86 processors, there are however stages for various processors, the x86 and i686 stages should work with the Athlon 850. If you get crashes when trying to use those the problem lies elsewhere, bad RAM perhaps.