Alright let me first say thank you to the linux community and especially LinuxQuestions.Org for all the help over the yeas from helping me choose which distro to go with to solving various instalation combinations. I am very thankful than I am running two hard drive with two O/S's Windows XP Pro on the first driv and SUSE Linux 10.0 on the second. I am now running SUSE on all my computers and do not need nor plan on going back to windows. Now onto my next question...

I have obtained an old Compaq Deskpro and outfitted it fairly well with some stuff I had laying around, Pioneer DVD-Rom, 512MB RAM, 40GB HDD ... so I get SUSE 10.0 on it (this computer will be for my 8 year old son) So anyhow I get to looking at the hardware specs and SUSE is telling me that it's running @300 MHX and it's maximum is 500mhz ... now I did some basic research and found that it doens't seem too difficult to overclock this CPU and is actually fairly common and my question to you all is how do I go about doing this? I browsed around here at LinuxQuestions and didn't really see anything pertaining to my particular situation. Anyhelp and how-tos would be great apreciated! - Bug

Linux is not dependent on MHz. It is dependent on memory capacity. The more memory it has. The better it performs.

Overclocking is either done by changing jumpers around or in the BIOS by adjusting the front side bus speed.

Overclocking is dangerous. There is a 99% chance that Linux will not boot up because of overclocking. I recommend keep it at its rated speed.

O.K. Thanks ... it just seems like that kind of sucks knowing something will perform better and can't ... I was hoping to run someof his (my son's) games a little fast and at higher resolution but I wil lstick with the 300mhz ... I am facinated about RAM usage I have noticed that Linux seems to swallow up ram .. I don't mind it since I usually put at least 256 megs in any computer I have (most have 512) but is there any need or way to optimize the RAM? Just curious it doesn't really bother me that much. - Bug

No "need to optimise" RAM. The linux kernel does this for you, basically by allocating otherwise unused RAM as buffers. If an application asks for more RAM, it just gets it as the kernel dumps the buffers to disk. If having dumped the buffers to disk, the application still needs more RAM, then it'll start using swap space (which is obviously slower than RAM).
So it is normal to see that all RAM is "in use", but if you start to see swap space being used, you could add some more RAM to speed things up.

HTH

thanks for clearing that up! I often wonder why windows is so sloppy with RAM? is it that complicated to have ther kernal use it wisely? I have contacted my freind with the modem problem ... waiting on him to get back with me with the info! -Bug