on further research, that p4 will mosdef run in that motherboard and it should run properly and at full speed. its a socket 478 and i could point you to a few reviews where they use willamette cored p4's and northwood cored on the same i845 motherboard at release with no BIOS updates. In my experience if a chip isnt compatible with a chipset it just plain dont work, for example my old pentium 200 got replced with a k6-2 450 which fitted the socket but wasnt compatible with the chipset even with a bios update. last year also i let a friend who i thought i could trust loose on my own PC to clean it up, she managed to crush the 4 year old Athlon 1800XP so i had to find a replacement and fit it in my trusty abit mobo. i got a 2400xp and upon booting up (no problems) found it was showing as a sempron 1900xp, one quick BIOS update on my trusty ABIT and it read as a 2400xp. so in that last one it was a change between palomino core and thunderbird core.

If this problem isnt speedstep, bios settings and/or bios update, i will eat my CCNA1-2 and 3-4 books and all CD's ( pass the gaviscon)

do OEM retail computers have BIOS upates available? Im not sure

usually they do but they can be a bit harder to find than say ABIT,Gigabyte and the likes, think it has something to do with them only wanting 'qualified' personnel doing in depth stuff like bios updates. what is qualified btw?? ive got MCSE, CCNA and HND does that mean im qualified? (qualified to scrub toilets!!)

ah.
i wonder if i would need a BIOS update to put a Pentium D in my Gateway 832GM

Gateway Support Drivers & Downloads

theres the bios u need, if u feel confident do the update then borrow a pentium D to test it out. but on checkin the specs for the intel 915 chipset your motherboard uses.....
computer says no
but u can use any of the single core pentium 4 skt775 cpu's. they seem to go fairly cheap on fleabay.

Good Game!!

thanks. i was about to buy one and i would have been clean outta luck- no floppy drive to boot off of. i might get a P4 650 or 640. possibly the 641

You can use a CD-rom to run bootable floppy files...
It takes a few tricks but it can be done

Ultimate Boot CD - Converting Bootable Floppy Disks (Like PowerQuest Partition Magic / DriveImage) into Bootable CD