I tell you what ... I bloody give up - I really do ...

I've spent the last month, almost on a daily basis trying to get this thing
to boot a Linux CD/DVD, all to no avail - the boot sequence would get as far
as ...

Verifying DMA Pool ...
Booting from CD/DVD

... and then just hang - nothing (I've even left it for a couple of hours
morse than once, just to see if it woke up - nope).

Not appearing to be happy with the bootstrap, methinks (hence my reluctance
to go any further with it).

Tried multiple distros, burned onto multiple disks (just in case the disk
was the problem) - Ubuntu, Kubunti, Xubuntu, gOS, PCLinuxOS, Mepis, that
nasty little Open-SuSE KDE4 disk, and others (all of which have happily
booted on my old machine), all with the same results ...

However, this morning I try again, just to be accurate as to where it's
failing, and the b*st*rd thing boots, as if nothing was ever wrong ...

It's as though it was just waiting for me to ask for help, so that it could
make me look like a complete idiot (they do things like that, trust me, I
know ...)