hello, i enjoyed reading the old messages on this fine site, but i couln't find the anwser to my specific question. i would like to 'hot rod' my dell optiplex gs+ computer. mostly i want to increase the bus speed. there are jumpers present on the mobo but i hevn't touched them yet. i read some brief articles about how the bus speed can be increased by making changes in the bios. this is attractive to me, because i want to upgrade the bios so i can boot from a cd anyhow. is the bus speed tunable from the bios? and what is the maximum bus speed atainable with my computer. btw i'm not a gamer or anything. i am trying to run a older DAQ system with this and want fast preformance to coinside with large amount of data being processed at once. and as you can guess this project has a tigher budget. thanks alot, Corey system specs: OS: windows xp pro ~166mhz pentium 1, non fan heat sink. ~64megs of ram ~2 gig HD ~cd / zip 100 and floppy drives ~DAQ: data translations dt2831 card and screw board ~'touchwindows' add-on touchscreen

To boot from the cd go into your bios and change the boot order. Hotrodding sounds like overclocking, which I'd be surprised if it was possible on your machine. Here is a related post, buts it for a P2... http://www.computing.net/cpus/wwwboard/forum/4233.html

When you increase your bus speed you will be overclocking your processor and with such an old Intel CPU you will probably burn up the CPU chip. My best guess is to go to the support area of dell.com and see if your computer can support an AMD processor chip, a K5 chip should be able to support up to 350 MHz or so and a K6 chip will go up to 550 MHz depending on the available bus speeds and CPU mulitpliers. For Windows XP 64 MB isn't nearly enough ram. On such an old PC I am guessing that the ram is 72 pin EDO then you may only be able go up to 128 MB (4 x 32 MB).

I'm running a Dell Optiplex 4100/L. I went to the Dell site awhile back to find out some info. This mobo has few choices for anything. It's pretty much one size fits all, and I doubt if overclocking is possible. As Bill, above says, MAYBE you can go to an AMD K6, which would help. But Dell also plays funny tricks with memory SIMM's. I can go to 64 mb, but only if I use 4 16mb SIMM's. No other combination will work. This old dog works ok, but there isn't much wiggle room for upgrading. I recommend a newer system, even a Duron or Celeron (ouch), as they can be overclocked a bit, anyway. Good luck.

thanks for the replys. wow. you guys are sharp. i would like to upgrade the ram, but belive it or not, i can't buy it anywhere around town!! right now i have two 32mb simms in two of my four ram slots. i will track down two more so as to bump it up to 128, as i find good deals. i know 64mb is skin and bones for XP. the bios will not allow me to boot from a cd, i tried each possible setting. lets just say i became well aquanited with the bios (previous owner implimented some kind of kill program) and my 6 XP boot disks!! i figured upgrades would be limited. i'll look into the amd k6. Yet, i thought i could do something like this: http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/talkback/talkback_14667.html thanks again, Corey

Got to this site for the memory for your system. http://www.sourceinternational.com Ask for this Transcend P/N: TS64MD3115, it is a kit of 2 x 32MB,EDO,SIMM for your system. Hope this helps a little!

I got 2x 64 meg 72 pin if you are interested. Just sitting here, doing nothing!