AMD Athlon XP 1800+ CPU

how do i know if my processor is bad? my motherboard will not give any error beeps, and i think it is shorted out. although the system fan and the cpu fan is working.

and what motherboard manufacturers support Kbyte DDR-SDRAM DIMM memory modules? MSI?? ASUS?? cause i paid good money for my 256MB PC2100 memory module, and i don’t want to buy a motherboard to find out that the memory will not work.

and even if the manual for the board says memory supported is PC266 MHz, PC333 Mhz, etc. will the memory work?