Laptop hangs after a while when running Mepis live CD

My daughter and I both have an ESys E320 Via 1.2GHz 256MB laptop and we've found that after approx 5-10 minutes the computer "hangs" after booting from the Mepis 6.0 live CD. This doesn't happen doing anything in particular or after any clear sequence of events. X and KDE seem to be working normally.

Mepis 6.0 certainly works fine with the laptop because I've booted from a DOS CD and restored a Ghost image of a working Mepis system to great effect. Laptop works as expected when Mepis is on the hard disk - it's only the live CD which causes the problem (and yes, I've checked the MD5sum and used different CDs!).

Now, the laptop actually came with an Ubuntu 5.10 CD, together with a note which said:
"For loading the software into notebook only, use the command:
boot: linux vga=771 noapic nolapic"

I tried the boot options above when booting Mepis, but they don't seem to stop the live CD problem.
I also looked at: http://www.mepislovers.org/index.php/topic,329.0.html
and maybe there are other cheatcodes I should try? I assume this is probably a power management "feature" problem...

Any ideas most welcome - I'm afraid the good folks on the MepisLovers forum haven't come up with anything yet!