Is your CPU a Pentium Dual Core or is it the newer Core 2 Duo? If so, then going from P4D to C2D will give you a good performance boost. But you would probably have to change your mobo as well as the CPU. On the other hand, if you have a C2D already, then a good upgrade would be to get a X2 type card, that has two graphics chips on the one card.

Good luck

Hard to say. You need to shop around. But, the critical components will be your motherboard, CPU, RAM and Graphics Card. I would go for an Intel system rather than AMD. At the moment, AMD do not have CPUs as powerful as those from Intel and with modern games, CPU utilization is higher.

Intel System Budget:

Mobo: Asus or Gigabyte with P45 chipset, CPU: E4600, RAM: 2GB DDR2, Video: 8800GT

Intel System Bigger Budget:

Mobo: Asus or Gigabyte with P45 or X38 chipset, CPU: E8400 or E9450 RAM: 4GB DDR2 Vide: ATI 4870 or Geforce 260 or 280

You can spend extra and get X2 versions of ATI 4870 or Geforce 9800GTX which have two of these graphics chips on one card.Thes will fit into any mobo. Or you can buy two separate cards and run them in SLI or Crossfire. But with this method, you need to decide before buying whether you wish to use SLI for Geforce cards or Crossfire for ATI cards as the mobo can only support one type of dual card usage. Also, you will need to make sure that you have a good quality PSU for SLI or Crossfire and to a lesser extent X2 type cards. I would say at least 600W PSU.

If you're going to buy pre-built then I would make sure that the CPU, RAM and Video are as according to the above and also make sure the PSU is good enough.

Good luck.

Nope. Thats the flash utility version. OK,, I found something, try this little program: http://download.esupport.com/biosagent/ba.exe

Run it and click the button near the bottom left that says, 'Get BIOS Info', then check out where it says, OEM Sign ON. The last part of this field gives you your BIOS F number.

Yes, there are other ways, but they are riskier in my opinion. If you have a floppy drive, you can download the BIOS file, unzip it and just copy the file ending with the F number to the floppy disk. This will be 1MB in size. Then go back to Flash utility and set the source of the update file to the floppy drive. Make absolutely sure that you use a fully formatted new floppy disk as no data corruptions will be tolerable.

Good Luck.

It might be quicker to buy a USB 8port PCI card to get you up and using your USB peripherals again. These cards are cheap. Then you could tackle the main problem at your leisure. On the other hand, check BIOS to make sure USB is switched on properly. It might help to disable USB in BIOS, boot into the OS, then reboot and go into BIOS re-enable USB and boot OS again. If I recall, I dont think you need to install any special USB drivers as Windows XP SP1 and higher is supposed to use its own drivers.