Easy check - slap a big fan on it - one of those 12 cm case fans works a treat. Fire up the PC. If it works, buy a new fan.

As for buying a 1GHz original Athlon - don't bother, you'll struggle to find one that is gonna work properly.

Best bet is to find out if your motherboard takes later CPUs. You'll probably struggle there too tbh.

If you are totally lucky you can pick up a board which has compatible memory still, as it's probably not DDR yet. You can pick up some bargains for slower boards with CPU & fan and grab some memory to go with it. Less than 100 quid for new stuff which will keep your PC going for ages.

Hopefully it's just the fan though, in which case it will cost ya about a fiver or thereabouts

xpPro doesn't require activation online as it is is a corporate edition meant for large companies,altho anyone can buy it.The reason for this is so that they can buy 1 copy of xp and then obtain as many licences as they require from microsoft,1 per pc.

Retail , Media centre , and some OEM versions of XP-Pro still require activation.

Not all XP-Pro are corporate versions , just most of the pirate ones

XP pro has got a string in it which lists certain keys which are corporate and therefore dont need activating. It does have a list of non-corporate single licences in it too.

My XP Home edition has never needed activated, even when my PC was brand new, and not when I recently wiped the HDD and reinstalled from the set up disks. XP in work has never needed activated or asked for a licence code or anything in any of several installations I have carried out?

Usually the case with recovery discs - you will find they are preregistered and you only need to activate the machine when you get it. Or it stores all this critical information on a seperate partition of your machine - usually with the system drivers.

That is prob the explanation.

Well, a replacement processor and fan have cured the beast as its now back up working perfectly.

So I am very thankful to Turbostream for his help in this matter.

Many, Many thanks m8

worst we had was when a psu died. i took out the motherboard, cpu, ram, video, scsi card, scsi cd-rom and HD i think. a bad bad day

I only managed the motherboard, cpu, and cpu fan Cheapo PSU caused the problem :thumbdwn: