YOU Freezes

My environment: Toshiba Tecra 8000; 256mb RAM; 38% hd free; SuSE 7.3 pro (clean install). Everytime, after downloading packages, my system freezes when I click on next to install the packages and a hard reboot is required. This is my first, second and third attempts to do an initial update to my system. Any suggestions would be welcomed! Thank You, Anthony