Insufficient system resources exist to complete the API

[lumis]

a friend of mine recently brought his box over for me to fix..

from what he was telling me, he was having problems booting the computer in to windows xp for a week or so.. and then it just wouldnt boot..

when he brought it over, it wouldnt boot in to windows normally or through safe mode.. it would freeze on the "loading files" screen when attempting to boot in to safe mode..

so i pulled the harddrive, backed up his files to my computer and attempted a format & reinstall..

everything when normally, for a while. i popped in my windows xp pro w/sp2 cd and started installing.. deleted the old partiton on the drive, did a full format (non-quick) NTFS, it copied files over, rebooted and started the installation..

as soon as it came to the first screen prompting me for input (the region screen i believe), it froze.. i left it there for a few minutes nothing.. couldnt even get the caps or num lock lights to toggle on and off.. so i turned the power off and it attempted to restart the install.. but it kept giving me the "Insufficient system resources exist to complete the API" for a split second and reboots over and over.. once in a while it will freeze at the blue background from the installation screen (but nothing else)..

so i tried an old 30gb hdd, same thing happened..

then i pulled the two 128mb sticks and put in a 256mb stick that i know works from a different computer, tried alternating the slot it was in.. i pulled the modem & NIC card (the only cards installed), disconnected the floppy drive & dvd-rom drive (i'm using the cd-rw drive to install), loaded the fail-safes in the bios (knocked the cpu speed from 1125 to 1000).. and tried a different power supply (it was using an antec, which i've heard is pretty good).. i would have tried a different video card, but it has onboard video..

the computer looks like a small-time prefab (not a dell, gateway, hp)..

i'm really at my wits end here.. aside from the motherboard being bad i'm not sure what else could be causing this..

any ideas?

[bevills1]

Have you checked the battery on the mobo? A dead battery can cause BIOS settings to be lost. Most likely it is a bad mobo if it's not a bad battery IMO.

[redwudz]

It really sounds like the MB. That's about all that's left except the CPU. If the MB battery was dead, you just wouldn't be able to save your BIOS settings, they would go back to default each time you boot. (And the date/time would have reset to default.)

I didn't see this in your post, but have you tried to reset the BIOS by pulling the battery for a few minutes? But it doesn't sound like a BIOS problem.

EDIT: Sorry, I see you did reset the BIOS.

One tool I've used with some success is Bart's PE ran from a CD. If it can't get it going nothing much will. It will run it's own OS, so a hard drive or a working OS is not needed, and depending on how you set it up, it has diagnostic tools included.

[bevills1]

There's also a CD version of Linux called Knoppix that has tools too, but I doubt it'll run on any boot device. It may be battery isn't dead but just weak which will cause BIOS problems. The battery is the first thing I'd check when strange behavior began. It's one of the easiest things to replace and costs just a few bucks. Once I had a PC that was acting normally in every way expcept the clock began losing several hours every day. I replaced the battery, and clock was back to normal.