What do you plan on doing with the system? Gaming? Coding? Drafting? Music?

Before making any suggestions, it would help to know what you're doing, and what your current system setup is.

Sorry it didn't even dawn on me to explain why I wanted to upgrade. I am taking a video editing course in school so I would like to be able to edit my videos from my Canon ZR90. I would also like to use the machine to play music, some games, check email, work on my website and do school work. Currently, I have a PIII 1GHz, 512 megs of ram (PC100), ASUS CUV4X-E motherboard, 60 gig Seagate (master), 200 gig maxtor (slave), 128 meg Nvidia GeForce 5200 Plus, FireWire, Sound and NIC card. I am currently running Windows XP Pro. I can use all of my drives and cards over again as they are new or very close to being new. I really just need a motherboard, processor and ram. Thanks

is there any budget you have?

Try looking at mobo combos at tiger direct, they have an Asus K8V SE Deluxe socket 754 ATX motherboard with a AMD Athlon 64 3400+ processor for $299., you should be able to purchase a Kingston 512MB stick for about $50.

Hi all not sure if this is the right thread or forum. but i am going to upgrade my comp. i mainly play games on it (war games) and these new games coming out need more power than what i have at the moment not sure if i need a dual core processor as i really only browse the internet or play games so not sure what i need so if somebody could put me on the right track please many thanks in advance.
heres what i have now
WINDOWS XP HOME EDITION
1.25 GHZ AMD ATHALON XP PROCESSOR
1024 MB MEMORY (not sure if its ddr or ddr 2)
HARD DRIVE 160 GB
GRAHICS CARD NVIDIA GEFORCE FX 5200.

not knowing much about computers i think i have writen everything down ok if not just ask.