Ubuntu 16.04 desktop freezes during installation

I have n older HP DV8100 series laptop that has been used with previous versions of Ubuntu 64 bit (14.04, 13) and those installations have worked well.

However the installation of 16.04 freezes during the installation. At first I thought it was occurring only during the final hardware configuration part of the installation but it has happened earlier during the file copy section.

I know the cause could be related to many things, though I am certain that 64 bit 16.04 can run on this laptop (AMD ML-40 processor, 2GB ram, 240GB SSD in adapter tray). About the SSD, it functioned perfectly under Windows XP. Its new and was tested several times. Ubuntu should be able to install properly on an SSD. The drive shows up accurately in the BIOS boot selector. I tried discoecting every exteal piece of hardware (USB express card, cardbus, etc). The install does start with a message about the synaptic touch pad not having a driver (or something similar) so I'm using a mouse which it recognized perfectly. Ruing the live DVD shows that the machine can handle the load, as the graphics are fairly smooth.

About the DVD, I have bued a second one (the first was 16.04 beta). though I know its possible the 2nd one could be bad.. The Md5sum was correct and the DVD was checked with the installer menu choice for analyzing the DVD contents. It also checked out.

The laptop is old and I wonder if the motherboard may have bad caps or some other low level problem, though the old Windows HDD never freezes. I wonder also if the DVD RW in the machine could be tired out during install. This machine can't boot from a USB DVD RW and if it did I would be using it, since the inteal DVD RW is a replacement for the original which was failing, and now the replacement is old too. Maybe it has some intermittent problem and can't carry the install to completion. I have an exteal USB DVD RW abd would use it if I could.

So this is my problem. I installed 16.04 on a new machine and its great. This old laptop still has life in it (XP works perfectly) so I want to put it to use. Its almost there and handles Ubuntu well. It just needs to get over this one hurdle.

Thanks for any help or suggestions.
Sk.