I have just re-formatted my hard drive and removed the battery from my BIOS and installed WIN 200 Pro from scratch.

I have A TINY PC, about 4 yrs old, its a
P111 750MHz 128M SDR DAM,
On motherboard sound Card : Creative AudioPCI (ES1371,ES1373) (WDM),
I was running Win 98.

I have tracked some of the common issues other people are having with their PC's in terms of upgrading OS's and drivers and having some success until the other day.

My sound card wasn't working at all, but now it does work, but crackles when i move the mouse or the PC processess some data..... also the CD ROM drive will not play Audio CD's.

In addition, I went to install an ethernet card to improve my broadband use, and created chaos, my computer seems to be struggling and getting confused.

In device manager both;
Multimedia Controller, and
Multimedia Video Controller,

are not working, and I have scoured for Drivers and can't find any.

Eventually when the ethernet card seemed to install it is now giving me a Error Code 31 indicating that it is not working due to another device not working.

Is there something simple wrong or should I re-install the system restore disk for my PC and live with Win 98 ?

An 'IT' friend of mine at work had a look and seems to think that there is something fundamentally wrong with the OS and recommend installing XP to see if this sorts it out, else he says my motherboard may be knackered ??

Help !!!