1. when restarting my computer (only on restart) the computer goes through the process of restarting but hangs up on the screen that says windows is shutting down plz wait. so anytime that i wan't to restart the computer i have to shut it down and manually turn it back on.... just wondering what might cause this. 2. i own a hp and when i have to do a full format i have to press F10 during bootup to access this option. when going through the process it does not give a option to select which hard drive(i have a secondary HD for personall use) i want to format. the first time i formatted my computer with this second hd in, it formatted the 2nd hd i and loaded xp on it instead of the primary and when i would restart the computer to load windows i would still have the same error cause it didn't do anything with the primary hd that my os was originally on. so after reformatting 2 or 3 times i finally disconnected my secondary hd and reformatted one more time and it finally worked. after plugging my 2nd hd back up and exploring it i found that xp had been installed on that also. so what i'm getting at is, is there a way to format my primary without disconnecting my secondary. my final question... i am in the process of building a computer and i'm using the 64 bit processor. i realize that linux is the only 64 bit os out there right now, but i'm a big gamer and linux doesn't run the games i'm using. so i'm forced to stick with xp. my question is.... since xp is only a 32 bit os does it only us half the 64 bit chip and if so if my chip is a 64 bit running at 2.0 clock speed is that going to be the actuall speed or is it going to run faster than a normal 32 bit 2.0 clock speed. help with anyone of these 3 questions would be greatly appreciated : )

Hey Chris, Have you tried removing all ad and spyware? Spybot S&D is good for that and it's free. Also, you should be able to do a repair on WinXP and that might help also. These are just suggestions. HTH

Question 1-- did it only start doing it since you stuck the second harddrive in? maybe that's doing it. Question 2-- Maybe you setup the partitions wrong..? That's my guess. Question 3-- This refers to a binary digit i.e it would either be a 1 or a 0, 8 bits make a Byte. It refers to information stored or processed in a digital system. For instance if you have a 64 bit processor then it can process 64 bits (8 bytes) of data every clock cycle. To the best of my knowledge, having a higher bit-rate for an operating system is just how much information can be transfered in that operating system. If by chip, you're thinking Console, then no.. Consoles use a different method and have chips. They can support 128 bits. I'm an avid gamer and, If you really want to get into serious gaming, It pretty much boils down to 3 things. Memory, Video, and Speed. You have a pentium 4 with 512 ram. That's good enough, trust me. The rest is dependant on your video card. That's what's going to pick up all the slack and keep it going smoothly. Try to keep your video card the best and up to date. Also, a lot of games allow for a higher resolution than is possible smoothly right now. It's so you can play the game later and have it look nice. (I remember when the thought of playing halflife at 800 x 600 resolution was impossible.) The reason I mention all this is because.. If you really plan on playing games on linux, forget it.. It's not worth all the time and effort waiting for companies to release the server-side linux packages. Linux is mostly good for keeping processes running smoothly, and never having to reboot. That's why they're good server-side only... So, just stick with XP or something. =3