my mom's old computer is not loading up.

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Those who can not afford a newer computer. This one is a Celeron 400, which is able to run XP, but slower. The performance on running Windows 98 is justified

Depends, I have a 350Mhz Pentium II running XP Pro fine. It boots up in 30 seconds, runs Google Chrome as a web browser as we as avast as the AV. No lag at all even with several programs running. However it has a faster 40GB Hard Drive and 384MB RAM in it. Not 64MB of RAM and some crappy 5"25 Quantum Bigfoot as a HD. I can run Office 2003, Media Player 11 and multitask just fine on it. I even have Xubuntu under Dual-Boot.

Does that include the BIOS boot time? You know, my i7 with 6GB RAM can't boot up Windows 2003 in under 30s if counting from the moment I push the power button and Windows 2008 is even slower. Even if the BIOS portion is excluded, which btw is exceptional slow if AHCI/RAID is enabled, it still only barely make the 30s mark.

After BIOS POST. When it actually starts loading up windows.

Unplug the floppy, the CD, and the hard drive, plug the hard drive back and try it.

This isolates the hard drive.

I keep a working but nothing much hard drive, to check hardware.

Or, set the jumpers to slave and install in another working machine, and see what you can read.

The drives of the era were small, 3.1 Gb, overfull is a common problem.

You learned video from The Blair Witch Project?

When the 400 was out, the largest hard drive was in the region of 20GB