BIOS giving wierd messages, software won't run

[mrhowdeedoo]

If this is in the wrong forum, I apologize. G'head and move it.

Alright, about a week ago, when I booted up my Laptop (Gateway Solo 5300) while it was still in black-screen-white-font (this is BIOS, right?) it started giving me a message:

Media test failed, check cable

It didn't hinder me at all, so I just ignored it. Then, a few days ago, when I was at my Uncle's house, and connected via ethernet cable to his network. It didn't connect. So I restarted (right before it shut down, the window popped up and said, Internet Connection _ is now connected..). While I was starting up again, it showed:
DHCP MAC ADRS _ ____ _ ___ (A whole bunch of numbers)
With a little spinny thing:
/ (spinning)

It didn't change anything that I could see, but last night when I tried to install a program, it said, "Windows 9X is not a supported operating system". This worked before, but I had to uninstall it for space.

Any ideas?
(If I see the second message again, I'll put the exact wording up.)

Thanks,
mrhowdeedoo

Solo 5300:
Pentium 3 700MHZ
256 RAM
20 GB HD
Windows XP SP2
(If I need to include anything else, tell me)

[Gizmo]

Is your NIC onboard or a seperate expansion? It sounds like the motherboard BIOS is trying to load off of a shared network drive. You should have your main OS drive as the first priority device in the BIOS.

[Statica]

If your HD is your first boot device and you're still getting those errors, then you are looking at a dying hard drive (I should know, Toshiba swapped out my hard drive last week). This may not even come up quite often, once you get the drive spinning subsequent reboots should be fine .. you might start getting more of these errors on cold boot.
Backup your data as soon as possible.

[mrhowdeedoo]

Ok.

I haven't done anything, but it's working now. If I have any further problems, I'll post again.

One more thing...I'm from time to time I'm seeing a green stripe on top of my screen. It acts just like the wallpaper (windows and icons appear over it,) and whenever I go through properties and hit ok (without changing anything) it fixes it. Should I worry, or just ignore it.

mrhowdeedoo