ok, thanks for clearing that up for me. As i said, my knowledge on hardware is awful! I still have a suspicion that my CPU isn't running as fast as it should. Fallout 3, which I was having some problems running on max graphics seems to run fine now, but only if I have the AA on 4x or lower, so i think that may be a bug with the game, and I know crysis was bugged to hell, so i will just ignore that completely. is there any diagnostic software to test the CPU other than 3D mark? Its probably fine, probably just me worrying, but for my own piece of mind I would like to test my CPU.

You could try one of these.... although I am unsure if one is better than the other.

http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Best/cpu-test_free.html (not a direct downloand link, but rather a download selection page)

ok, thanks very much

TechSpot's download page has a nice selection of benchmarking tools for that purpose as well.

ok thanks for the tip. its about time I had a good look at TS's downloads anyway.
I'm running that CPU test and its taking 6 hours... just over half way through now.

A quick thing about your ram problem/problems. If your bios allows it, you could overclock your ram, thus making it run at a higher frequency(unfortunately this can cause problems/lower the expected life of your hardware so I wouldn't try this if you aren't comfortable with it). Also in your bios there is a memory hole option. I don't remember exactly how to do it, since i haven't fixed a problem like this for about 2 years, but you need to disable the memory hole in your bios. I can give you more specifics later if you would like but I am on my laptop right now (which is a mac) so I can't really check. hope this helped a bit.

i would be interested to hear about the memory hole thing. I don't really want to overclock it, as the life of most computer components seem to be so low these days I would rather keep it as it is, unless there is an option that won't shorten the life of it.

O.K. I just went and checked and you go into your bios, selecct advanced chipset features, memory configuration, then go to memory hole. change the setting from enabled to disabled and see if this helps. I can't promise any performance benefits, but it SHOULD (emphasis on should) make it so you see all 4gb excluding that which is removed because of its being used by other programs. If this does not work, I'm sorry.

There isn't a problem with the RAM. The CPU has a FSB of 333MHz, you then multiply this by 4 to get the rated FSB of 1333MHz. The RAM is DDR2-800, which runs at 400MHz. If the RAM is running at a 1:1 ratio, i.e. the same speed as the CPU (333MHz), then it is underclocked.

ok, all this is beyond me, so I don't have a clue.

unfortunately i got 3 and a 1/2 hours through the CPU diagnostics test and i got BSOD so i dont think I will try that program again.