Well, after a laborious (and un-fruitful) experience with gentoo, I realised that there was something wrong with my hardware. I ran memtest and came across more than 1000 errors before the test was completed. I used cpu-z and saw that one of my RAMs is being overclocked. One of them is at 133 MHz and the other at 166 MHz and for some reason, the motherboard is also running at 166 MHz. There is no provision as such in the manual nor on the Asus website to change the speed. I've also downloaded the latest BIOS update in the hope that maybe they've added support for this. But nothing of the sort.

Is there some sort of BIOS patch I can download or some utility which can change the speed?

Here are screenshots of cpu-z:









System specs are:

AMD Athlon XP 2600+,
Asus A7N8X-VM/400 with geforce4mx and nforce 2,
256mb + 256mb RAM,
160 GB Samsung HDD.