HP Pavilion ZD7000 shuts down when attempting to load operating system

This is an old laptop so….it worked okay for what it was, XP system. Has a sketchy power plug. Thought loading a slimmer OS might make the experience generally better. Made a dual boot with linux. Worked fine with both operating systems for about six months or so. Then failed to load either operating system . Windows safe mode fails when it hits agp.sys. Linux returns a bios error [        0.060000]  . . MP-BIOS bug:  8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC . XP Recovery console fails to load. Ended up loading FreeDOS which works. Tried to load 95, 98, ME, all fail at around 20%. Maybe a driver corruption or conflict or something has occured in the BIOS? Any help would be great. Thanks!