If you can't afford a super new CPU + Motherboard the best thing to do is get more RAM, 128 is perfect amount, programs take much shorter time to start (loading times). Get a fancy graphics card too with 32 MB DDR RAM and yout pc will fly !!!!!! RAM is pretty cheap nowadays specially with the rumour going around that DDR ram is going to become the standard soon (its not for a while though) and graphic card prices drop every month!