Kernel hang on install; LEDs blink

I was recently installing Kubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) on a new Intel Core 2 Duo System. The kernel kept panic'ing during the install; the video would get garbled and the caps lock and scroll lock LEDS kept blinking. That would suggest a hardware problem. I tried playing with several BIOS options to see if disabling something worked; like disabling DVMT, EIST and so on. I also tried booting with a reduced VGA setting and also some different vesa options. I tried with 'acpi=off'. None worked.

I then tried the memtest86 program on the CD to check if the RAM was OK. And that program hung. So it was the RAM that was the culprit. I had 2G on the system. Setting 'mem=1G' didn't work, but 'mem=1024M' worked. Weird.