Such upgrades once were a good idea, there used to be lots of articles in the 'newbie-pseudo-techie' magazines. Nowadays, as others have said, in order to get any reasonable performance increase, you really need to upgrade the MB, and then almost everything that plugs into it. The new RAM is incompatible, and the older style is mostly unobtainable. Especially the HDs, older PCs used the 40 pin IDEs, nowadays almost everything is the 4 pin SATA - you can get small plugin adapters.

Buried somewhere on my website is an old article that took me a lot of time to learn all the stuff therein, in which RAM was much less than 1 Gb, processor speeds were about 10% of today's rates, disks that had 1 Gb were totally unthought of, etc. Most of the 'tricks' of that day are not even worth worrying about.

In fact, when finally biting the bullet to upgrade last year, I eventually decided that a laptop was the most cost effective way - for the same price of just a desktop box - not even bothering with the new MB route, it was cheaper to just buy a new complete box - and then extra for a LCD screen. The performance for mostly web browsing and 'Atomic Typewriter' functions was more than adequate, and now I can just pick up a few kilos and not worry about damaging disks, etc.

I had said that I would never get a laptop ... well they are even more of a nightmare to upgrade ... I'll just get a new one in a few years ...