Help me make my decision on wheter or not to buy new PC setup

[err]

So my MSI K8N motherboard is FUBARed ... It has been extremely unstable in the past 1.5 years and I think it is caused by power outage about 1.5 yrs ago. System is running WinXP and always reboots for no apparent reason. I troubleshooted for a longggg time and I believe it is the motherboard that is broke.

Anyway, my power here in the northwest has been completely horrible again during the past week and I think it has killed this mobo for good. System is more unstable than ever and reboots crazily for no apparent reason even after fresh install of XP or Vista.

I am currently debating whether to:

1. Spend $40 from geeks and buy new Mobo. Be done with the problem.
2. Spend about $450 for Intel Core2 Duo E6600 + Asus P5B mobo.

I am currently leaning towards just spending $40 to fix it because I have just bought new Plasma, Wii , DS Lite and other toys in the last 2 months. However I am willing to spend the dough to upgrade if it makes sense

Thoughts?

Btw, I am using this PC mainly for Internet, Web development and Photo editting. No extreme games on it for now

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: err
No extreme games

Just buy the motherboard and maybe a UPS to protect it (I too have lost many motherboards to power issues). There's no sense in blowing a bunch of money on a CPU that will show literally no speed improvements over what you currently have. Firefox on a Core2 is the same as it is on a Pentium3.