"Guy Smith" wrote in message
...

" The manufacturer is Gateway, made in 1998 and is an ATX case. Everest
report below... "


Well, your main hardware components a

Motherboard: Intel WS440BX
Sound: Creative SB 64V (onboard)
Processor: Intel Pentium II 450Mhz
Memory: 256MB SDRAM
Video: ATI 3D Pro Rage 8MB AGP2x
HDD1: WDC WD200BB-75AUA1 18GB
HDD2: IBM-DTTA-351010 9GB

You've said that you wish to upgrade the motherboard (and obviously the
processor too). Any up-to-date motherboard would also require DDR RAM
instead of SDRAM, and if your son wished to play any games, then a new
graphics card would also be needed. Then, a new power supply would be
needed to power an up-to-date system, which would far surpass the power
requirements of the current system.

You can gut the current system and go for any ATX motherboard. I suspect
that the current case is lacking in case-fans though, which will be
necessary to get air through the case to cool up-to-date components. I
would also suspect that it's not worth keeping the hard drives, as they are
slow, and small in capacity.

You just have to work out how much money you have to spend, and then base
your choices from your case and copy of Windows XP Home upwards. You'll
probably have a little hassle re-activating Windows on the new hardware,
which might mean a phone call to Microsoft to confirm that you've upgraded
the system. The world is really your oyster from here on....