Have HP Pavilion 4456 with celeron 66mhz bus 366 clock. Would like to make it faster using the same mother board if possible and practical. It is now just as above specs and unchanged from when new. It may not be practical costwise to make an ebay purchase for the fastest cpu compatible with the bios, but somewhere in between what it is now and the fastest may be cost effective. If any of You happen to be familiar with this 440zx socket 370 chipset and know what is the highest clock speed proccessor compatible with this Motherboard and bios, I would greatly appreciate your thoughts. Also, I would rather not have to order Memory by hp part number if any of You know specs on that and how and where to purchase at reasonable price by memory specs and whether practical to upgrade OS to windows xp.

How low of a budget are you on? For less then $300, you can get a completely brand new system with WAY better hardware then what you have now. I live in Washinton and here we have www.computersonics.com and www.infotechnow.com ...the stores are local here but you can piece together a system there and they will build it for you at computer sonics. The ship as well, so no matter what state you are in, you could probably place an order from them. I'm not very familier with old HP hardware..but hopefully this will give you a bit of help in your future upgrading. Jared

Although you have a slow CPU, a faster CPU won't help near as much as a RAM upgrade. Old PC66 low density RAM is gonna be expensive no matter where you buy it. PC100 may work, but PC133 probably won't work at all. Do as much research as you can before you buy...make sure you get the right stuff or you may be stuck. Don't install XP, even if you upgrade CPU/RAM. If you do, you may find that you'll need to upgrade other components as well...especially if you have any ISA cards (modem or sound?). Bottomline...is it really worth investing in that old machine? Asus A7N8X-X 1800+ @8x210mhz 512mb PC3200 Ti4200/8X 128mb WDC 60GB

Thanks for your common sense objective answers, but plan to keep this computer as one of several on home networking so still need answers to the questions. I think You are right re. upgrade of windows. I will keep the w98se on that and one other older machine. I plan to do the work myself and the most I will do is upgrade to a little later Mb and cpu but would rather just upgrade cpu. also don,t plan spending more than few bucks. Upgraded two other desktops with cpu's from ebay auctions for cheap/cheap, but have no experience with socket 370. I make my hobbies more fun by keeping the cost down

old pc66 ram is VERY cheap if you buy it 2nd hand on www.ebay.com

"old pc66 ram is VERY cheap if you buy it 2nd hand on www.ebay.com" You may be right about that...I was thinking "new". I've never checked ebay for prices on PC66...never needed too...lol Asus A7N8X-X 1800+ @8x210mhz 512mb PC3200 Ti4200/8X 128mb WDC 60GB

just had a quick look: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=14916&item=6708532008&rd=1 26.50 + 7.50 shipping = $34 This one looks good though: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=14916&item=6709200896&rd=1 Asus A7N8X-X 1800+ @8x210mhz 512mb PC3200 Ti4200/8X 128mb WDC 60GB