What is it about Dells? Anyway, had a drive failure so started reinstalling on new drive - kept stalling during the initial file-copying phase so tried different CDs different drive but still no joy. Started checking hardware & it seems everything is running very slowly - running memtest is tedious, just getting the cd to be recognised is hopeless. I've checked the (fairly basic) BIOS, set everything to default & still no joy. It's an old pc so not worth spending a lot on it, but any other ideas on these symptoms - voltages? hardware failing? "I've always been mad, I know I've been mad, like the most of us..."

My guess would be that either the CPU is overheating or the RAM is bad. Does the BIOS have hardware monitoring? Check the CPU temp.

Thanks for reply - memory checks out ok (eventually) & no sign of overheating anywhere - the heatsink's clean, cool & no signs of having been (re)moved - there's no monitoring but it's an Intel chip so wouldn't expect it to run too hot anyway. The system just starts off slow & stays that way - memtest test took well over an hour for 512Mb. "I've always been mad, I know I've been mad, like the most of us..."

<i?"the heatsink's clean, cool" The heatsink should not be cool. That would indicate that the heat is not being transferred from the CPU to the heatsink. Loose heatsink or poor thermal compound job? I once had a problem with extremely slow memory. I reset the bios and it fixed the problem. I suspect that the memory settings somehow got glitched.

Thanks for reply - cool is all relative, if it was overheating it would almost be too hot to touch & as the heatsink does not show any sign of movement I can't envisage that being the problem. I swapped & reseated the memory &, as I said, reset the BIOS, but no difference. "I've always been mad, I know I've been mad, like the most of us..."

"if it was overheating it would almost be too hot to touch" The heatsink should be at least warm to the touch. If it's not, that's an indication that the HSF isn't installed correctly. All you need is a tiny dab of paste between the CPU & heatsink. If you layed on like you're frosting a cake, that's the problem. And when Intel CPUs get to a certain trigger temp, they begin to throttle down in an attempt to lower the CPU temp. "it's an Intel chip so wouldn't expect it to run too hot anyway" You're wrong there. The P4 Prescott heated up like a furnace & earned the nickname "hot potato". The main reason Intel developed the BTX format was to deal with the extreme heat issues of the P4. They finally came to their senses & went back to the P3 which was a superior design & the outcome was the cool running Core 2 Duo. Of course, that did away with the need for BTX, so they abandoned it. But that left several OEM manufacturers (that had retooled for BTX) holding the bag. Pull the heatsink, thoroughly clean it, apply a fresh dab of paste, then reinstall. THIS is all you need (yes, I know the pic is of an AMD CPU). http://www.arcticsilver.com/pdf/app...

Found the reason, hyperthreading is disabled by default in the BIOS & I never noticed it first time around. I never knew it made quite so much difference - basic installation of SP2 Windows took 14 hours, left it running overnight before having another look. "I've always been mad, I know I've been mad, like the most of us..."