Upgrading Old PC

[clintster442]

I figured it was time for my 4 year old daughter to have a computer to play games on and study (yes, study... her daycare gives her homework).

I have an old Medion circa 2005 that I want to upgrade for her so she can learn how to treat a computer before I build her her own. I bought it at Costco.
I looked up the board and it appears to be an MSI n1996. It currently has a Pentium 4 2.2GHz and 1GB of DDR memory (four sticks of 256MB). I found some specs for the board on HP's website:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?cc=us&lc=en&dlc=en&docname=bph07557

...and it appears that the board is already pretty maxed out from the maximum's listed. Is this the case or can I change the processor over to a higher speed unit like the P4 Extreme 3.73GHz? Same with the memory, is it maxed out now or could I up it to 4GB with four 1GB sticks?

If not, what is a nice cheap build option for a board/processor/memory combo? The case is ATX and the power requirements are pretty light. The main focus is just internet speed as all her classwork and Nickelodeon games are online.

As a side note, her room is upstairs which isn't wired for ethernet so I hooked up an old Linksys WUSB54GS I found. It works fine but is maxed out at 1MB/s. What's a faster option for wifi, either internal or external?

UPDATE: I found more notations on the board and it appears that it is an MSI model MS-7041, version 1.

 

[Maxime506]

No, this mobo is too old and the upgrade money will even be more expensive than building a new rig. For your sweetheart just get the cheapest laptop for her is enough.

 

[Unolocogringo]

I would not spend money upgrading.
You are already maxed on memory. Going from a P4 2.2 to a P4 2.53 is also a waste of money.
About the most you could do is install a cheap agp video card to relieve the video processing from the cpu.
Reinstall windows, without all of the bloated crapware that came preinstalled on it new. There is a good guide here on how to tweak XP for all levels of performance.
http://www.tweakhound.com/xp/xptweaks/supertweaks1.htm
To be honest ,for internet and nickelodeon you don't need anything more than you have except maybe a cheap video card.
With a few performance tweaks from the site mentioned above.

You can try moving the usb wifi adaptor around the room with an extension cable. The 1mb connection is because of weak signal, it is capable of 54mb connection with good signal.

 

[clintster442]

thanks beloved patriot, that is exactly the answer i was looking for with excellent support and options for solutions. much appreciated

 

[Tom Tancredi]

Walmart $300 for a laptop or desktop and will be ALOT cheaper then trying to do any upgrade (if you could find compatible parts at all that is) to realistically. Also these all come with WIFI normally (even on desktop models), and will be able to use the latest Wifi standards (WAP2 and 802.11n). I would suspect that old beast is back on 802.11b which really has no bandwidth nor reliability.

This would be the easiest and cheapest solution IMHO.