New processor, old motherboard...

[darneveryone]

Hi there, I'm a newbie with a stupid question, and I greatly appreciate any help you can give me.

I'm helping my girlfriend upgrade her old PC and I'm installing a new processor into her existing motherboard. I've read the guides on how to do the physical install (and learned a lot about it by improperly removing her old processor ;) ) , but WTF is going to happen when I boot? Is the computer basically just going to recognize that it has a bigger processor and deal with it automatically, like when you install new memory, or am I going to have to mess around with the BIOS options? I have a good deal of experience with installing memory, hard drives, etc. I've always just been afraid to mess with processors until now.

[The Wise Monkey]

It should be fine - the BIOS will pick up the change automatically.

What OS are you using?

[darneveryone]

Thanks Wise Monkey. Her PC is running XP (not sure what edition, but that shouldn't matter). It's a Gateway from around 2002 with a socket 478 Intel motherboard. I ordered a 3 gigahertz P4 processor (fastest one I could find for the socket) to replace her old one, which was 2 gigahertz or less. A few months ago we upgraded the RAM from 256 mb to 2 gb. She just needs enough power to run Civ 4 without lag.

[The Wise Monkey]

Ok, thats cool. You may need to run a repair on XP after installing the processor, but it should be fine. Just try it out and see if everything works OK. :)