It looks like the early slot A Athlon processors and the subsequent socket A
Athlon processors overlapped at 900MHz; so, you'll need to determine which
type of processor you have in order to find a proper relacement motherboard.
If you are happy with the performance level of the current system, I'd
suggest trying to pick up a replacement motherboard on the cheap.  You may
have to get something through ebay, since I doubt that you'll find any slot
A motherboards, new.  The socket A motherboards, which support up through
the Athlon XP 3200, are available, new, but I think almost all of these
require DDR memory.  You'd have to see if you could find a socket A board
that also used regular PC133 RAM, in order to reuse your existing memory
modules.

Otherwise, I'd think in terms of starting a new system build, pretty much
from scratch (MB, processor, memory, power supply), and for this either the
Athlon 64 processors or the Pentium 4 processors would be fine.  Depending
on the kinds of things that you use your computer for, I might have
preference towards one brand over the other, but both are good processors.

John Sproule

----- Original Message -----
From: "Craig Lauritzen" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, December 12, 2005 3:35 PM
Subject: [PCBUILD] CPU upgrade - motherboard


> My keyboard buffer is out on my motherboard so I need a new motherboard.
> I have a athlon 900mhz MSI board in a gateway mid-tower St. Francis model
> case.  I am looking for some advice on what to replace my motherboard
> with.  I don't want to spend a lot of money.  Should I stay with some type
> of Athlon system or go to a intel P-4 system?  What are my compatibility
> limitations?  I am running Windows XP, and the current system has a 40 gig
> hard drive and about 850 MB of 133mhz ram.

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