Do you know exactly which processor you have? i.e. What model and speed your chip rated for.

My best guess is that your BIOS changed the bus-speed or CPU-multiplier. I'm sure those words sound foreign, so I'll briefly explain. The speed your processor runs at is produced by multiplying the speed of the bus with the CPU-multiplier, both of which are set in the BIOS. If one of the settings is reduced, the chip will run at a reduced speed. If your processor is supposed to run on a bus-speed of 166MHz with a multiplier of 11 (producing 1826MHz) and you reduced the bus-speed to 100MHz, the effective speed would end up being 1100MHz. If this is what happened with your settings, all you would need to do is load up the BIOS settings and change the bus speed to 166.

The method of loading up your BIOS configuration varies by computer but is almost always loaded by pressing a key or combination of keys when the computer begins loading. If you watch the screen when the computer first starts loading up, you should see instructions on what button to hit in order to load the BIOS configuration. Once you're in there, you will need to look around in order to find out where to modify the bus speed. It varies greatly by computer but is usually referred to as "bus speed", "memory clock speed", "processor bus speed", etc.

Before you make any modifications however, let us know exactly what chip your computer has so that you don't accidently end up frying your chip.

well... im not sure exactly what chip im using... is there any way of finding out?

How did you get your computer?

If you bought it from a large company, what company built it and what model number is it?

If you had it built for you, ask the person who built your machine.

You can try running Everest. Everest will tell you what hardware your system is running.

Is your computer a laptop?

ok... so... after running this everest thingy it says that i AM running a 1.1 processor. well... that be a bit weird then...

right... so, what would you advise the best thing for me to do... buy a new processor? something a bit erm... better! meh.

is your computer a laptop though...

nope. its a desktop... got it from the local pc guy about nov 04, but i think the b****d sold me short... last night i read the invoice i got for the comp, and it says he sold me a 3Ghz processor!!!

well... yeah... like i said, not sure what to do.

I believe you might have an amd atholon sempron 3000+. Its clock speed runs at 1.8 ghz (its comparable to a 3.0 ghz intel chip). So saying that it was running at 1.8 ghz was probably correct.

What i would do is to check in your bios to see if you are running at full clock speed, ie full front side bus speed. Also check your ram timings and make sure they are up to full speed. All this can be done in the bios (ie. restart your computer, and keep hitting F2 as it starts up (before the windows is loading screen) and it should be in the bios pages)

erm... how do i check they are running at full speed? and ram timings?