So, we've basically said that it doesn't make a lot of sense for most people to upgrade unless they're either wealthy or woefully behind the times. There are still quite a few people who may only be slightly behind the times, so let's look at that area. First, let's talk about whom we feel should upgrade. The most important factor is that you're unsatisfied with performance, and for us, that means that you would have to be running less than a 2.6 GHz/2600+ processor (or any of the Sempron or Celeron parts). If you have a chip that's already faster than that, you probably don't need the additional performance to upgrade. Assuming that you decide to upgrade, we'd recommend going for the fastest or second fastest processor on each of the "old" platforms. That means the Athlon 3400+ or 3700+ on socket 754, the Pentium 3.2 or 3.4 GHz on socket 478, and as we already mentioned, the Athlon XP-M is your best bet for maximum performance on socket A. Any of those upgrades will set you back $125 to $225, and that should hopefully get you to the next platform update.
