Hmm...is it worth it?

Hello to all.. first of all, i'm new here and plan to stay to catch up on my computer skills that have deteriorated over the past few years.

Second...I spend a lot of time on my computer nowadays and think that some upgrades would help spice it up more. I like to play various games and love a good performance boost.

Do you think it's worth it to upgrade my:
Dell Pentium 4 - 2000mhz, 256mb DDR ram, 64mb geforce mx420, cdrw+dvd combo...maybe I could get some nice DDR modules with some heatsinks, i've seen those Corsair ones, they look pretty good. My monitor is a crt 16"..I wonder if a flat panel would help at all. Maybe my eyes, I guess.

Lately I have noticed that things have been going slow during certain activities..I do regular maintenance (eg. defrags, scan for data miners + nasty trojans, peek around and delete useless files) and would greatly appreciate some advice on keeping the computer fast and healthy.

I have 800 canadian dollars to spend on upgrades..

Thanks for all your efforts to help me out.

I am getting into programming as well, which is something I have always wanted to do. I have (cough) Winblows XP homo. Error this error that..I look at 1337 operating systems such as the many flavours of Linux, FreeBSD, Unix, etc. Would it help to get an OS like that? I have a Python GUI that I play around with sometimes, i'd like to get serious and start sharpening the sword that I could be.

When are you noticing the slowness?

Processor wise you're probably ok, depending what you use. The biggest boost by far would be to add at least another 256mb of ram, maybe even 768 (up to 1 gig). If you game and want to play the latest games, upgrading the video card would be good too. Check out newegg.com. You can pick up a radeon 9800 pro for $210 us (~$280 candian). Those two upgrades should really pick things up.

If you do that and you are still not satisfied with performance, an upgraded cpu would be the next step.
Note: upgrading the video card and cpu will use more power, if you only have a 250 or 300w power supply, you'll probably want to up that closer to 400w to ensure stability.

Thats how I would spend it
HTH

Upgrade your RAM - check your motherboard specs though to make sure you get the right kind of RAM and size limits.

Get the best monitor you can afford. You can always keep your monitor once you get a new comp, seems like the best bang for your buck.

I notice slowness when running games...I have no graphical slowness whatsoever but there is always a pause or lapse of time when I want to go to a menu during a game, switch back to Windows desktop, run another program, it also shows a low on virtual memory block when i switch back to Windows. That's because of me tweaking the memory settings earlier..etc.

Upgrade your RAM, it's cheap and easy to install. That should take care of the comp running slow with multiple programs running. Good Luck. Check pricewatch.com for some decent prices