Acid

For all of the people who are thinking of upgrading (myself included), the first thing you have to do is figure out what you want to upgrade. you also have to consider bottlenecks and what youre mobo can support. but most of us dont know what mobo they have, so i did a little research and found a way. I ended up finding a forum on Annoyances.org about finding it. it seems that when the computer starts up, it displays a BIOS number/letter code on the black screen for a short bit on some computers. if thats the case, you visit www.wimsbios.com and match the number to a list of many, many motherboards. you can also download a program that extracts the BIOS number and displays it, along with mabey displaying the actual type and manufactuer in some cases. you can find the program in the thread but be Strongly Advised to be very careful when using the program. it is 1.3mbs in size and that is more than it would take for that so it most likley contains other strings of code that may do things to your computer. i would install it, run it, get the number, and quickly uninstall it. read more about that in the thread above. Just thought you might want to know.

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Acid

Also feel free to post comments or anything else about upgrading with windows XP in this thread.

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Wulfyn

http://www.cpuid.org/cpuz.php

A great little utility called cpu-z. It tells you pretty much anything you wanted to know

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Acid

neat, ill check it out. i checked out the program i found and it is NOT a virus or contain one. the only potental problem is that it finds EVERYTHING about youre computer. all user accounts, guest accounts, usernames, CD KEYS, along with chipsets, mobos, and monitors and everything else. it opens as a temp file under ///c:/blablabal/temp.html so it isnt on the internet but you dont know if it sends the info to a website, im guessing that is doesnt so i find it an extremly useful tool. please post any other useful programs you find here.

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