hello i know nothing about pc's all i know is mine is really slow i have a celeron 430 1.8ghz cpu with 1gb of ram running vista ican get a 3.0 ghz pentium4 but would i need to get a new heatsink and fan and i am upgrading my am to 3gb all i need to know is will the cpu work they are both socket 478 and will i need a new heatsink and fan
You should check if your motherboard supports the CPU you are buying as well, and I would also recommend a new cooler because P4s put out a lot of heat.
I don't think going from a celeron to a P4 will make much of a difference. With vista you will get better performance by increasing your RAM (Vista runs better with at least 2gb) and getting a better video card(for better desktop performance). If you are using onboard audio, get a PCI soundcard (less than 20.00) will reduce the load on your cpu. If by slow you are talkng about video editing/converting even a 3ghz pentium won't help that much (you need a dual/quad to see improvements in that area) Removing bloated antispyware software will also increase your speed. Vista has a utility that will rate the performance of your computer. It will tell you where the weakness is in your system.
You'd be surprised, Celerons are terrible compared to P4s. Socket 478 will never be able to run decent processors, but a 66% increase in clock speed and a better CPU (assuming it's a late P4) will be a big increase. He said nothing about gaming, so a better graphics card isn't needed. More memory would be strongly recommended with Vista. Also, you need to read up on sound jony, $20 sound cards do not reduce load on the CPU as they do not have hardware processing.
I would also suggest disabling themes using vista aero. The theme will not look so pretty but running Vista on such an old build is your first problem. This is one time Id recommend using Win XP.
i can get hold of a INTEL PENTIUM D 820 2.8GHZ SL8CP DUAL CORE is this cpu any good and would i need a new heatsink and fan
Which motherboard do you have? The Pentium D 820 is a dual core processor, so it is an upgrade, but it's a very slow one. If your board supports Core 2 Duo processors, you would be much better going for one of those.
That board can support modern Core 2 Duo chips, I strongly recommend getting one of those instead. You should update your BIOS before you install the new CPU.
on the new cpu i am getting it state that it will not run unless i have Intel EM64T-enabled BIOS but thats what it states on my cpu do i still have to flash my bios before putting in my new cpu
i can't find anywhere to download the bios from i have been on the mobo website and there is no bios download on that site does anybody no where i can get them from my mobo is a foxconn 45cmx
