the difference between that arctic cooling unit and the zalman 7000 alcu is... well it is hard to find words to describe how far apart the performance is between the two - "light years" will just have to do...

what type is your cpu?

you need to completely remove the existing thermal compound - then clean both surfaces with isopropl alcohol - then apply some arctic silver 5 compound - about a 2mm diameter blob

suggest the zalman 7000 alcu as efficient and quiet

matthias s. wrote: I don't want to screw anything up here

3 things u can screw up:

1. slip of screw driver makes nice gouge in motherboard - solution: protect the area with plastic from the blister pack the new heatsink comes in

2. if you have a pentium-m or athlon xp cpu, u can crack the chip - solution: don't rock the heatsink on or off the edge (keep force vertical)

3. sometimes depending on the heatsink, the metal can catch on the edge of the socket preventing good contact with the cpu chip - solution: use the zalman and it can't happen or look carefully...

also, any ddr400 should run fine at 333, so no point in ultra-premium brands, samsung and micron chips are good usually - if you can't return the ram (not a local store) then you would be safest with whatever chips the current module is using since compaq probably didn't allow for a large variation in brands when setting up the bios...

http://www.ec.kingston.com/ecom/configurator/models.asp?root=us
might have your compaq model

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericDocument?lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&docname=c00032472#

that might be your mobo? - the chipset supports 3 gig, so the 1 gig limit seems artificial possibly simply that 1 gig modules were never tested for that model.

worth an experiment if you can purchase and try things from a local store.

misc notes: 2 ram modules will give you 5 to 10% more performance than 1 due to the nforce2 design (dual channel) - ddr400 might be less expensive than 333 and should probably work ok but it's important to run them at the same speed as the processor fsb. - there is a darned good chance that an athlon xp 2500 mobile cpu will work fine in that board if the bios has multiplier settings, but don't swap the cpu yourself if you have no experience with athlon xp's - (bit off-topic but some extra cpu horses should help the virtual pc thing as well)

Matt Newman wrote: My first question is can an array grow, ie can I start with a couple drives and expand. depends on the software in whatever controller card you pick Matt Newman wrote: My second question is whats a minimum starting size (ie 2, 3 disks). minimum for raid-5 is 3 drives Matt Newman wrote: And finally any recommendations on an inexpensive (ie cheap) PCI you should describe your application. depending on the eventual number (and type) of drives in your array, you could exceed the bandwidth of the controller card or the pci bus. most controller cards perform poorly. i suggest you investigate lsi Matt Newman wrote: I would prefer SATA, but PATA would work too the only difference between sata and pata is ncq which is mainly only useful for server type applications. for non-scsi servers, the only sensible choice is the western digital raptors for both multi user access and rating for 24/7 operation. for media processing, backup and desktop use, the maxtor 300 with 16 meg cache and the new seagate 7200.8 series are good choices. note that raid-5 is a poor choice for any application that does as many writes as reads - the write performance of raid-5 can be 4 times slower than reading. so for example, a database that is getting write activity (such as a forum) should be either raid-1 or raid-10