Can't install FreeBSD Current or 7.0 on Acer 5520-5679

We have an almost new Acer 5520-5679 in the office that we intended to  
partition and  install 8.0-CURRENT-200712-amd64 but much to my  
surprise accessing the cdrom it went into an immediate, unreadable  
loop of hex numbers that can only be stoped by powering down.  I next  
tried 7.0BETA-4 standard (no amd64) and I can get to the Welcome menu  
but with all options end up with a BTX halted, almost immediately.

The machine specs are:
AMD Turion 64x2 Mobile TL-58 1.9 Ghz 2x512K Lw cache
2GB DDR2
160G HDD

Has anyone else seen this with Turion 64x2 or is it an Acer thing.  We  
should learn that cheap is often expensive.

Thanks,

ed