Finicky Machine?? Or DAU??

I've got a question about the innards of a computer. Well, not really a question, but I seem to have exhausted all my knowledge and am getting frustrated. I have a Pentium III 550 box that only had 64 megs RAM. It was bought almost 3 years ago and hasn't been upgraded at all. It is running Win98 and a conglomeration of other useless stuff as well. This machine hasn't been used for anything but internet, chat and e-mail capabilities. I just recently got a while hair up my butt and decided to put a little money into it because I am getting started in security and I wanna start playing around with some flavors of Unix. I went out and bought 256 megs of RAM...168-pin DIMM PC133 and a CD burner so I can back things up before I start fdisking. Now, I install the RAM and burner at the same time...stupid thing to do, but I did it. Always do one thing at a time, right? Well, I install and try to bring the machine back up and I don't get anything. I have power to the motherboard, as my NIC's activity light is reading traffic. Although, I don't know how it's doing that, because it doesn't even boot through the BIOS. I get no hardware beep, no POST beep. It just gets power to machine but doesn't do any loading. The harddisk spins, but can tell that nothing is loading. I get no signal at all on the monitor. I thought that maybe I might have burnt the RAM out, as I've seen that before just from not seeding it fully and trying to start up the machine. I don't smell any thing burnt, so I don't think that's it. And I can't imagine having burnt out a brand new stick AND the old one in one sitting. Just doesn't seem feasable. I have tried re-seeding the RAM....removing the RAM and putting the old stick back in, disconnected CD-RW, re-seeded every dogon peripheral in the god forsaken box, and even left it to sit there and think about what's it's doing wrong while I went and got drunk. I've talked nice to it, dirty, came close to kicking it once or twice and had several of my other coworkers take a look at it. It's almost as if just opening the case doomed me. I don't get it. I'm stumped, confused and frustrated. Anyone have any other types of hardware troubleshooting steps to try? Anything I have missed? Your help would be greatly appreciated.

ok...here goes,

First, disconnect EVERYTHING .(including cards) but the floppy drive and the video card
then see if you get any boot. If u do, start re-connecting things one thing at a time.(u know, install HD...then power up. if you get boot...shut down and install the next thiing..then boot up.....rinse and repeat as many times as you can untill it dosn't boot..then the last thing u installed is the problem...

g/l....i'll be online for a few hours today if you have any ?'s about this process....

Follow his advice and remember to ground yourself so you don't shock the life out of something.

I appreciate the advice, that is actually what I was going to do when I get back to my room for chow. One more question though. Do I revert back to the old RAM when doing this or do I try my luck with the new stuff? One more thing that I thought of is maybe my board can't handle the RAM. Like I said, it's a PIII 550 Mhz, so I know it's a fairly newer jumperless motherboard. So it should be able to handle PC 133, right? And if it can't handle that PC 133 would that burn out the slot if it tries to ask for more power than the slot can handle?

for now, I would use the old ram installed into the original slot it was in. Did u jack with any BIOS settings when you installed the new stuff? If so, reset the stuff back to the default settings. After you get it back running then you can try the new ram and see if its fryed.

In my experiences, using a ground strap is normally only needed if you are in a real dry environment, where static is a problem....but using one cant hurt....u know..better safe than sorry. :)

The board should be able to handle it no prob...I installed tons of pc133 ram into older boards(>2 yrs old) with no problems

alright...i'll give it a shot...thanks a lot guys.