"M" key falling off

It's pretty easy to swap the key, but it's probably what holds the key on causing the problem would be my guess. If you want to try just putting a new key on, go for it. Check out THIS post on it.

In all reality, other than EXTREME situations you won't notice that big a difference between 1.6 and 2.5. Especially if you desktop is well maintained. i've got a P2 400MHz desktop that I've been tweaking for four years and while I can obviously see a speed difference between it and my sager 2.4 GHz, it's not as dramatic as everyone seems to indicate. A lot of how well a computer performs has to do with how it's maintained. I have friends who have 1-1.5 GHz computers that were honestly SLOWER than my 400MHz just because they let too much crap run in the background and didn't keep things tight.

Keep in mind, your desktop probably has an advantage of a 7200rpm hard drive. Hard drive intensive programs will be held back some. You can run SiSoft Sandra to benchmark your system to see how well it's running.

Also, no I hadn't hear of anyone having a problem with a key staying on, but I have heard of a key splitting in half.

But really, seriously, how often do you need the "M" key? Really? I haven't used it yet in this post and there's nothing wrong with it!

Also:

Yeah, my primary HD is a 7200 on my desktop, but I was pointing out that "observing" a difference in a real-live test like playing a game would be more difficult that the 3D benchmark tests show. ie: "my benchmark was over a 1000 points higher! Why does everything seem the same?"

Try to keep the system registery as clean as possible. Periodically look through it for those things that programs leave behind, also watch our for programs running in the background. Things like winamp agent, yahoo messenger, msn messenger, ect. All of those things eat up bandwidth. Ctrl + Alt + Delete and check the task manager. Quite a number of the things running can be closed. A good number i used is that if I have more than four icons (not counting battery indicator and volume) in my system tray I have too much running. Clean up your desktop and start menu, if you don't use it (windows XP "hides" the icons you don't use, but they are still there, just delete them if you don't use them). That will help your boot speed. Don't use enourmous pictures for your packground. Most can be fine but you don't need super-hi-res pictures that take up 1.5 MB as a background picture, us paint-shop and resize it. Get a program like ad-aware to help you get rid of those irritating programs that come packaged with lots of downloads.

A good indicator is the "performance" tab under the task manager, if your system "idles" at 10% or more CPU it's a good bet you're wasting resources on too many programs.

When I was running win98 on my desktop I'd close everything except systray and explorer, if I wanted to listen to winamp while I gamed that's fine, but there's no reason to have it running when you're not listening to it.

Oh yeah, I can hardly tell a difference with IM programs, winamp, and IE running on a 500 mhz vs. a 2.4. It's when I run the 3dmark tests that I see the difference.

For cleaning...if you're not using win2k, type "msconfig" into "Run..." and click the startup tab; uncheck a few of the useless stuff (if you know for sure that it's useless...don't go messing around with it TOO much)

Then you should probably run adware checks...www.lavasoftusa.com

and finally you probably need to defragment, although I don't see a noticable difference when I do.

Defragmenting will very rarely do anything for your computer speed (unless your drive is REALLY fragmented) Defrag it like once a month and you'll be fine (I do it ever night but I'm a psycho). Defragging would only speed up write time to the drive (since it doesn't have to "hop around" and write to different areas of the disk for a single file. Mostly Defragging will decrease the size of a file and give you more disk space.

The biggest change I've ever seen was with my parent's computer, we had had it for at least four years and had six family members using it constantly. We hadn't defragged that whole time. Finally we ran out of disk space (on our "massive" 1.6 GB hard drive). I defragged it and we ended up with over 400 MB of space!