Easy 50 Points!

One thing to check is your hard drive ata/100
instead of 66 or 33? The hard drive has to be
ata/100. I believe that motherboard is and you should have the newer very fine lined IDE
cable with your motherboard. Then it just a matter of running the upgrade program from your hard drive manufacturer.

Good Luck
Richard Bolha

Here's what I like.

First: SiSoft Sandra (Benchmark/testing program with lots of tuning tips.)

Second: Zone Alarm (Possibly the best personal firewall available.)

Third: AdAware (Spyware removal tool. Go to www.lavasoft.de for this one)

Fourth: MemTurbo II (RAM recovery/defragmenter/monitor)

Fifth: YATS32 (A nice little time sync program)

Sixth: Copernic 2000 (An excellent meta-search engine with specialized categories)

The really nice thing about these is that most of these can be found in the download section of ZDNet, and all are freeware/shareware.

With this setup get a DSL/Cable modem if you can. You'll fall in love with the response speed!

Of course, it should go with out saying that you'll need a good antivirus program. I personally prefer Norton's software.

For the desktop, just find pictures you like and use them as your background.

Have Fun,
Dusty

To change the look and feel of Windows I use two main products one is Windowblinds at http://www.stardock.net and the other is called Nextstart I don't have the link to it handy but doing a research with the above post proposed Copernick will get you there.

You'll also be able to find wallpapers, Skins & themes for the proposed applications at :

http://www.wincustomize.com

WinAmp is also an interesting application it permits listening to about every kind of soundfile you can fall upon on the net along with streamed netradio.

All these but Nextstart are free or have free versions.

1 - Download Desktop Architect (desktoparchitect.com) to make your own "theme".

and/or...

2 - Go to the AMD site "Cool Stuff" page (www.amd.com/products/cpg/coolstuff.html) and download the Athlon theme, and while you're there, pick up a couple of extra GHz wallpapers.

Like racing stripes on your car, these are quaranteed to make your system go faster. And the "cool factor" definitely ramps up!

1) Install Norton Utilities that replace the Windows Defragmenter and ScanDisk, as Norton Utilities is a better and faster tool.

2) Look for wallpapers that you like on the net. I am sure you do not like the wallpapers I like, as all people have different likes. Just download a couple of themes that you like and install them.

3) If you fell that your memory is too free and you have too much hard disk space, try installing 2 or more Anti-Virus programs. They protect you against more types of viruses.

4) Download some mp3 files to liven up your computer!

5) Install some games that you like.

This should take up quite a lot of your disk space, and also get the best out of your system. Try it!

Sounds like you're headed for disaster.
If you are looking for software solutions that will speed up your PC- but not influence your PC's reliability, you're going to have a tough time finding them. The best thing you can do to crank that puppy upa notch or two is to install the latest drivers- here are the crucial ones: bus-master IDE drivers, IRQ miniport router, AGP/video driver. Installing software that claims to speed up your PC will more times than not end up slowing down your PC in the long run.
The real way to gain speed is hardware, and you're already on your way to that.... Make sure your memory has a CAS latency of 2, and then tweak your BIOS.
Changing the "boring" desktop brings in another reliability issue. Windowblindswill do the trick, but be prepared to restart alot more often due to gliches in the new shell. Just change your wallpaper, it's much easier, and if it gets REALLY boring, try Linux instead.

A great site for all these downloads is
http://www.download.com

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