hi!
i tried to open my pc .. and it detects my hard drive - ram - vga - dvd rom
it reaches the point where .. it says boot from cd .. and then i always wind up with a black moitor .. and only black.
I cannot open in safe mode either.
When i tried to place the windows cd .. the moitor says press any key to boot from cd .. and you can hear the cd working but the moitor is still black.
this is most likley a hardware problem i think.
but how can i check this out?
can i see it in bios somehow?
should i disconnect anything???

Turn off the computer and disconnect the monitor.
Now turn on just the monitor.
You should see a message saying no video signal has been detected.
If you don't see this it probably means the monitor is shot.
Happened to me with a 3 month old LCD monitor. Luckily the warranty took care of it.

Without any video you can't see bios or anything.
And if it was a video card problem you most likely would get a bios beep code.
I believe it is 1 long beep followed by 2 short beeps.

TaZMAn

it detects my hard drive - ram - vga - dvd rom
it reaches the point where .. it says boot from cd .. and then i always wind up with a black moitor .. and only black

The bios drive detection, monitor, motherboard, and video display are working.

If you have an XP CD, boot the machine with it and run chkdsk c: /r on the disk.
(c: (or your volume letter))

From: Description of the Windows XP Recovery Console for advanced users

Option 2: Starting the Windows Recovery Console from the Windows XP CD-ROM
If you have not preinstalled the Windows Recovery Console, you can start the computer and use the Recovery Console directly from your original Windows XP installation disc.

1. Insert the Windows XP CD into your CD drive and restart your computer. If you are prompted, select any options required to start (boot) from the CD.

2. When the text-based part of Setup begins, follow the prompts. Select the repair or recover option by pressing R.

3. If you have a dual-boot or multiboot system, select the installation that you want to access from the Recovery Console.

4. When you are prompted, type the Administrator password.

5. At the command prompt, type Recovery Console commands, and then you can refer to the commands that are listed in the "Available commands within Windows Recovery Console" section.

6. At any time, you can type Help for a list of available commands.

7. At any time, you can type Help commandname for help on a specific command. For example, you can type help attrib to display the help on the attributes command.

8. At any time, you can exit Windows Recovery Console by typing Exit at the command line.

Post back with your results and any further questions.