Don't want to fry my CPU

Want to know how I can get my CPU running faster in order to be able to write more stuff with Reason. I have a powerspec pc with a Supermicro 370SWD mother board with a celeron 500 mhz processor with 320 megs of RAM. Want to know how much I can safely alter the clocking speed and CPU speed without needing extra cooling or anything. Any other tips to increase the CPU speed or maximize the general processing speed whether through the Bios or windows 2000 settings would be appreciated (i.e. virtual memory). Basically some songs in reason with a lot of machines running make the CPU meter in REason go way up and the song runs choppy. Thanks a lot! peace!

You usually will not get very far with retail heatsink. (For an illustration of what they're used for at overclockers, see the last pic on this page: http://www.overclockers.com/articles471/)

There are exceptions but I don't think Celeron 500 is one of them.

In the AMD world there are deals for really affordable all copper heatsinks like Thermalright SK6+ for like $8. I'm also interested if there's anything similar for Intel CPUs for that cheap.

You may try it but you may not get far enough to notice a difference without risking damaging your equipment from overheating.

You might try getting a $41 1700+ and a $48 biostar mobo, that rig is about ready to go in the retirement yard(just gave my computer illiterate dad a 533). Just pop those in with your current stuff.

$41 1700+? Where @ newegg? Those are T-Bred A's lately.
$49 gets you guaranteed B elsewhere.

I don't know if that Supermicro mobo is overclockable or not. Don't really matter, the 500 Celeron won't overclock much anyway... you'll be lucky just to run 75 FSB for 563 MHz... and some wouldn't even do that much. Go ahead and try it, as long as you leave the voltage at default, nothing will get hurt. The worse that can happen is it won't boot.