I'm going to try to add a little juice to my computer tomorrow and need some advice. It's a AMD athlon 2000xp with Asus A7v333 motherboard. Everything is running good, but hot. Going to change out the stock AMD heatsink fan and replace it with a Thermaltake Volcano 11 + and see if it'll cool down.
Also going to add some memory..using up to 70 to 80% now.. and another hard drive...which I don't need..but too late already ordered it. My question is should I do it all at once or one thing at a time..power up and check.

Thanks for any info.

One step at a time would be the best route. Then if anything goes wrong you'll have a pretty good idea what it is.

I would add the:

1: Fan

2: RAM

3: HDD

Well my upgrade didn't go 100%...did the ram first cause the fan was more complicted. Ram installed good..then installed fan, removed old thermal on processor with alcohol, installed fan..much bigger than stock. But the system shuts down before it will get into desktop. Tried all three installs..1. Just install and it runs full out all the time. 2. Install with sensor that regulates temp. 3. Install with manual fan controler. All worked, but the system shuts down as I said. Installed hard drive anyway and it works I guess it shows up.
I had to reenstall the old fan with new thermal and it's running much cooler than before but system is not stable and shuts down continusly when on-line.
Anybody got any tips on what may be going on?

have you tried just installing the ram and the hhd?

and have you made sure that you have set master/slave properly?

It ran good when I just installed the ram..then when I installed the Volcano fan it wouldn't boot. I'm running it now with the old fan, new drive and memory. It runs fine until I go online then it runs a while and shuts down into a re-start or either the browsers close. I've tried Firefox, Explorer and Slimbrowser..they all do the same.
I've got the drive set up as primary slave.
I installed 80mg drive when I built this 5yrs ago. My Asus Probe shows I have an 80mg drive, have used 6bytes and have 76mg of free space. It should show I've got 156mg of free space with the other 80mg drive I installed yesterday.
My bios and computer properties show the two drives.
My memory shows as it should.
For some unknown reason my old fan is operatiing fairly well now. Took the house fan away and closed the case up and cpu is running around 60c and it will operate around that temp..shuts off in high 70's.
Would like to install the Volcano fan but don't know what the problem is.
Nor do I know why I can't stay online...any info on any of this will be appreciated. It's hard to get a post in before I get booted.

Update: I'm going to add one more stick of memory..got one more slot to fill..first two have 512 333(pc2700) should I fill the last one with 512 of 500 (pc 4000) or 512 400 (pc 3200)

it sounds like an overheating problem. check that there is no dust blocking any of the case fans and that the heatsink is positioned correctly. do u use theral compound?

I got everything running..new fan and all. Don't know why but the old fan now cools the system as good as the new one. Might have been all I needed to do was clean the old thermal paste off the chip and replace. I partitioned and formatted my new drive..works better now.
What I did to make the new fan work was to clean the heatsink face off with alcohol and put a film of thermal paste where it sits over the chip die. Don't know if I was suppose to do that or not, but before I did it the system wouldn't boot up.

Just to add information Artic Silver makes very good thermal products and cleaners along with very detailed application instructions for various CPU types.

In most cases a very minimal amount of compound is the best.

Glad you got it up and running!

Heres to a happy Ending!

Thanks for the help fellers..but it's still not fixed. Matter of fact I think it's just about to blow. Been real bad this afternoon shutting down and going into restart. Told me once to install a Turtle Beach sound card driver and I did..then the next time said it was an ATI driver so I re-installed my video card drivers. It's still not right. I think I'm going to have to build a new one.
I hate to though cause just put this up-grade on this one and everything is running good if it would keep running