http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pc+upgrade+guide Read some of those pages for information about how to go about upgrading, as far as the actual work.
You are somewhat limited in what upgrades will be available. You currently have an Athlon XP 2800+ with a 333MHz bus. I believe that is the fastest there was with that bus. You could locate an XP CPU with a 400MHz bus, the fastest of which is the 3200+, however the actual speed increase is extremely small (117MHz, the much higher 3200+ rating is based on the combination of frequency and bus speed increase). The cheapest on Pricewatch is 167 dollars for that. A very low value performance for dollar upgrade. Your CPU currently isn't great, but it's equal to what I have myself right now (at least until FedEx gets here with my new parts today.
)
However a video card upgrade could be tremendously helpful to you if you play any games. Upgrading a video card is one of the easiest things you can do. It just takes a few minutes with the case open to stick the card in, and connect your monitor, and then a few minutes of installing drivers.
The integrated video on your mainboard, with the VIA KM400A chipset, is extremely poor performance in any 3D tasks. Even when it was originally produced, being an integrated video chip, it was the lowest performing thing you could still call a 3D video chip. Not only is it a low performance chip, it is also using some of your main memory for video memory, making less of it available for your applications. By default those systems usually use 8MB just when you're using Windows, and it can allocate up to 64MB if needed.
Even a Geforce MX4000 would probably give you some performance increase, if you needed to go as cheap as possible. However you can get much better performance per dollar with something only a few dollars more. A GeforceFX 5200 card with 128MB dedicated video memory would probably provide astounding performance relative to what you have now. (The MX4000 would be better, but maybe not actually astound you.
) You can get an FX5200 for under
$37 shipped. Or for
1 dollar more get a bit more performance with faster memory on the card. Or even better,
save 5 dollars with a mail-in rebate, although that one does only have on VGA connector and no DVI, which shouldn't matter to you.
$55 shipped (
or $45 after rebate)might also be something you'd be interested in for a good bit of performance increase, though not as astounding over the FX5200 as the 5200 is over your current system.
The 6200 series might offer slightly better performance than the 5200, but they run about 10 dollars more expensive, and also would not be competitive with the 5500. After that, the 6600 series would essentially blow away the 5500, but they get up into the
$75 after rebate price range. Models better than that become much more expensive very quickly, and by that point, the low speed of the CPU becomes a factor in limiting game performance.
Increasing the amount of memory in your system could provide a significant performance boost.
$45 dollars would double the amount of memory you have. It could provide a small to very large improvement in performance, depending on what tasks you normally are performing. If you do things that require lots of memory (high resolution photo or video editing, and gaming), or if you multi-task with a very large number of programs open, then that could be worthwhile. 512MB as you currently have is for the most part quite enough for day to day tasks, such as web browsing, email, light gaming, but more memory rarely hurts. (Note that although your system uses DDR2700 memory as the maximum speed, PC3200 modules are usually backwards compatible and will simply run at the lower speed. PC2700 modules are becoming less available, and are now more expensive than faster modules.)
There isn't a whole lot else that can be upgraded, without having to replace the mainboard. Whether any of these upgrades will be a good value for you depends on your uses. Your system is far from totally obsolete, even as it is, as I expect it performs just fine with day to day tasks. The hard drive performance probably isn't worth trying to upgrade, unless you just needed more space. Performance in day to day tasks like web browsing and email are probably limited by whatever Internet connection you have, although with many web sites now that use lots of Flash animations or lots of scripting, better CPU performance can help, but to see a difference in your case would require a CPU that needed a new mainboard.
Without seeing your case and power supply, it's impossible to say whether you could actually replace your mainboard to support a faster CPU and memory. The case is almost certainly usable, with any other microATX mainboard, however the power supply might be an odd size making it hard to get a supply that could fit and actually supply enough power for newer processors. Power supplies in OEM systems are rarely powerful enough to make upgrades like that.
If you actually are looking for a complete top to bottom upgrade, replacing case, power supply, hard drive, CPU, memory, video card, then look through other threads here. There are continuously people asking about what system designs would be best for them. What's right for you will depend on what your budget is, and what things you do with the machine.
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