I have a Dell Dimension 2400 that was made in 2003 with XP home. I have put in: Realtek RTL8169/8110 Family Gigabit Ethernet NIC; an Nvidia graphics card, I can't remember what kind but I know it's better than the integrated graphics; 2Gb of RAM; a 3.06GHz/533mhz P4. I am getting windows 7, a Western Digital 250GB WD2500AAJB 7200RPM IDE Hard Drive w/ 8MB Buffer, and some thermal compound for my cpu. The more searching I do to find the cheapest but sufficient upgrades, the more exhausted I get. So far, that's $220 I've spent on upgrades. I can't sell this thing and get a better one, that's why I'm upgrading. With the new hard drive I'm getting, do I need a hard drive fan? Do I need another cpu fan? Should I even waste my time with upgrading to Windows 7 because I found out that MS invalidates your old key. So I can't use my W7 if I find another computer that's better than this, but still has XP. If I am able to sell this thing, would I get enough money out of it with the upgrades, or is it a waste of time? One last thing--I found a program to let me know the cpu temp because I don't have my thermal compound yet and the temp right now is 122F, but has gotten up to 126F while multi-tasking. Is this a safe temp without the thermal compound? Thanks everyone for your help.

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