Lec, I have the Hp Pavilion as well and lost the screen, anyway to cut a long story short, I got a Dell 21" monitor from Pcworld plug it in and away we go
Also years ago I got an Integral (brand name) external hard drive case, and stuck a 500G hard drive innit, took everything off the computer on to the remote, so all that's left is the operating system, the speed increased at least double.
What I do now is open the program in the remote and work from that.
Another trick which seems to works well is I laid 12" floor tiles on the desk and it acts as a heat sink, it runs much cooler now.