I've found that some software is designed to work with Pentium and will not perform on other processors. I finally upgraded to a P3 from a Cyrix. I know that Cyrix is not the same as AMD, but I found that I couldn't run some softwar on my old Cyrix. It would load, but would never start when I tried to open the programs. When I loaded the same programs onto my Pentium, they work fine. I'm a little leary about non-Pentium processors in that respect, but as I said, I'm not that familiar with AMD Athalon and it may be an excellent processor, so I don't really know if this would be true as it was with my Cyrix. Melanie