Stuck with Feisty Fawn?

[blue_spruce]

A while ago, a friend gave me a Toshiba satellite 1800 s253 laptop. I installed ubuntu 7.04 (feisty fawn) on it no problem. However if I try to upgrade it to 7.10 bad things seem to happen. When I install 7.10 I am stuck with a command line. When this happened I wiped out the partition and reinstalled 7.04 and everything worked great. I like to experiment with this machine so I am going to attempt to upgrade again, does anyone have any suggestions on why the upgrade did not work or what I should look for? Is there an easier way to go back to the previous version than wiping out the partition and reinstalling.
Here are some of the system specs:
processor - pentium 3 850
ram - 376 MB
video - trident cyberblade Ai1 AGP
nic - Intel 8255xx based PCI Ethernet
sound - ALi Audio accelerator

[Partyboi2]

There is no easy way to go back to a early release of Ubuntu.