LOL. I was out fixing Macs. It's what I do for a living. Adults don't get off at 3:00, not ones that still have to work anyway.
The black stripe with white text is a kernel panic, 99% of the time it means hardware error. Take the RAM chip that you took out, and put it into the slot where you have the one chip. The newer KP has the grey window shading thing, can't remember if 10.3 does the grey, but the black bar/white text that you got I see often often on new systems with bad RAM.
If you get the same thing after putting the other RAM chip into the good slot, I hate to say it, but the old laptop has a serious hardware problem, probably on the logic board. Slight chance it's the HD, very very slight. The only way to check would be with another HD. I really doubt it's that though.