How to do freeform text search across multiple fields ??

hi gang okay, freeform may not be the right term, but dunno what else to call it... I gave up finding anything with google, so now I'm turning to you lot This is an early beta version of the DB over all x86 CPUs ever made, that I'm working on: http://metalbunny.net/computers/cpudb.php It still has all the debug code, so should be pretty evident how it works .... the part in question is running off 1 table with 14 fields and hundreds of records (when all the data is entered into the DB atleast). the table is called cpu, fields are as follows: cpuID make model variant type clock multi fsb l1 l2 vcore vcache form socket What I wanna do is make it possible to search for partial content in model,variant, and type fields, all 3 at the same time, or each individually as the user wants...case insentive too ... But I have no idea what a query for that looks like ... none of my references do something like that .... Basically ... if you search for athlon, it should be able to find Athlon, Athlon XP, Athlon MP, and Athlon64 ... (which are all in the "model" field) ... or like you enter "Thunderbird", and have model,variant, and type checked, it will be able to list only those that have Thunderbird in the type field... also ... how do I do range searches ... like listing all speeds from 500 to 1000 or something like that ??? yeah, I seriously need some decent documentation for constructing SQL search strings.... TIA Rene -- Rene Brehmer aka Metalbunny http://metalbunny.net/ References, tools, and other useful stuff...