I have an old hp pavilion with a 500 mhz pentium 3 processor. I gave it some more ram and it works nicely but i want to put a dvd drive in and the 500 mhz processor isn't quite fast enough to watch videos. Where can i find specs about my machine so that i know which newer processors will fit. I'm not looking for anything super fast, something like 1.5ghz

"i want to put a dvd drive in and the 500 mhz processor isn't quite fast enough to watch videos"

You probably have a Slot-1 CPU with a 100MHz FSB. The Slot-1 didn't come anywhere near 1.5GHz at 100MHz FSB. I think the best you can do is 800MHz. Check into the motherboard's specs before doing anything. IMO, it's not worth upgrading.

A 500MHz CPU should play DVDs just fine. If you're having problems, I suggest you look elsewhere for the cause. What video card do you have?

Asus A7N8X-X
1800+ @ 8 x 210MHz
512MB PC3200
Asus Ti4800SE 128MB
WinME/WinXP Pro

Jam is right. Try upgrading the Video card. If you don't have an AGP slot there are still some pretty nice PCI graphics cards out their. Now don't get that confused with the new PCI Express x16 if you don't know a lot about them because they are a totally diff then PCI.

If you have an AGP slot then it's probably the first version of AGP and they are much harder to find cards for then PCI cards, but if you can find an old agp card like an Nvidia TNT 2, Geforce, Geforce 2 then grab it.

The reason i think the dvd problem involves the processor is because when i look at the cpu usage in the ctrl alt delete menu it shoots to 100% when i try to watch a dvd. Will a new video card change this? Also if i did get a 800mhz processesor what are the specs that i need?

Is your video card an onboard video card? Because onboard video cards suck off of your motherboards ram.

You just need to get a better video card that has at least 32mb of ram and try shooting for that Pentium 3 800mhz processor as well because that will also help which will give you a 27% boost of processing power over what you already have now.

Go to HP site and look up your model and see how far you can upgrade the processor to. With pc name brand motherboards for the most part you might be able to upgrade it to a 650mhz at the most.

I had an old Compaq 5240 and I couldn't upgrade the processor past 100mhz faster then what i had, because at the time because AMD didn't make a faster cpu. So when that motherboard was made it only went up to 500mhz upgrade.

3rd party motherboards normally are made right when they get a new series of a processors lineup infomation from the processor companies or right after a new processor lineup is released to go sale to the public which gives the 3rd party motherboard companies a wider range of what you can upgrade to. But a pc name brand motherboard on the other hand normally produce the motherboards around the processor for that model of a that pc. It sucks, because it limits your cpu upgrades in the future. But that is what you get when you buy pc's from Dell, HP, Gateway etc....