Shoutbox

I have a laptop that was restarting in a loop when it loaded windows xp. however it booted in safemode every so often.. however because i had no need of anything on it and it was given to me because it was "broken" i formated it. Now i want to reinstall windows xp but whenever i try it freezes at some point prior to the installation or restarts in a loop, or crashes with a stop screen. but it will boot off a live evaluation cd for Suse Linux that i have... according to a computer technical shop that the person who had it took it too it was a problem with the motherboard. does this seem right considering it would enter windows in safe mode and now will run suse linux live evaluation fine. i would appreciate any suggestions of what i could do to get it to work again as its a pretty decent laptop. celeron pentium 4.
         thanks

EDIT: does anyone know how i can reformat a pc that doesnt have ANY OS on it whatsoever, i need to format it again in a different way so i can install win98 on it then update it to XP