Have some good news! Decided to upgrade and got an ASUS m/b with G41 chipset (ICH7), its definitely faster than my old trusty P4, it was actually an unplanned upgrade, I only wanted to upgrade the m/b and still use the P4. Unfortunately this board seems to be incompatible with the P4 cpu so I had to fork out quite a lot of money for a new cpu as well - core2quad q8300 cpu. Guess it wil be my christmas present. XP installed flawlessly and also installed all required drivers, so everything worked by the time XP finished installing itself on my newish system. This m/b ia also DX10 ready - a nice little bonus I guess, but I use XP so its of no benefit to me lol. Will buy a new graphic card later, I have to use the onboard x4500 for now since my Nvidia GForce 5500FX doesn't fit in the new PCIex slot and also need a new SATA hard drive, but that will have to wait for another time, the upgrade cost a lot of money already. Well thats all news I have for now. Jen