ok, i have 2 problems. i bought a new tower (the thermal take Xaser, with a load of fans, two front, two rear, one on the side panel.) and a new maxtor 80 gig hard drive. when i started my system, it took a long time to boot, it reads both drives by the way. it boots as long as my sisters 600 celeron! it is pissing me off, and the system idle process takes over 90% of the cpu speed when it is running, i cannot even play music! I also wanna overclock my cpu, but i don not know how to get into my bios, my compaq has a queer bois, anybody know how to overclock on a comaq mobo. any help would be appreciated, by the way i knew about compaqès but i only had credit at radioshack at the time LOL

Jeff We are having the same problem. I posted as well. What are your exact system specs ? Have you recently added or deleted anything ? How long have you had your computer ? It helps having a log book where you write down when and what you have installed or deleted, and what errors or blue screens have come up . It really helps when you have to call someone or take it in to the shop . You might try going to Hardware Analysis at http://hardwareanalysis.com .

ok my computer is as follows p4 1.6 ram 512 ddr 2x 256 hard disk 1 maxtor 80 gig (slave) 1 st something or other compaq default 60 gig, 1 partition radeon 64 meg video card Pci case Thermaltake Xaser II mobo the original compaq one, with lan and audio integrated ps the original compaq one 1 dvd drive 1 cd writer 1 floppy and thatès about it

Your not going to be able to overclock a P4 as far as I know. You are running an intel P4 1.6 gb processor and you definitely shouldn't have any slow performance. There are some free utilities out there that will show you processor and chipset diagnostics. Check out http://testcpu.webz.cz/ and http://www.h-oda.com/ I had a runaway processor with a certain HP Keyboard driver that caused the cpu to go crazy when I launched the Windows Media Player. The processor would max out at 100% until I pulled the keyboard applications from the running process. It apparently was a driver issue with HP and when I upgraded to XP I no longer had the problem. Maybe a driver or program conflict is occurring? One thing you can do to speed things up on a large HD is by installing your operating system (Windows) onto a smaller partition under 8 GB. This will give you optimal cluster size at 4 kb which reduces HD head seeking time and disk space waste. You can then divide non essential system directories onto the rest of the disk, preferably in 8 GB partitions. If your not already, I recommend you run Windows XP to increase performance as well.

as far as i know compaq boards are not overclockable. You can overclock a p4 but the motherboard has to support overclocking.

ièm just wondering could my bad speed be due to my ps, its real crappy, shoul;d i go buy a 420 watt

I see you're running XP. If you have SP1 installed and/or lots of progs and files on your hard drive, you will have a slow boot. My 1800+ takes 10 times longer to boot in XP than in WIN98SE (dual boot). However it's fine once it does boot up. Head on over to Windows XP forum, lots of threads on this subject. The Old Tech.