New mobo and processor?

[agent]

Hello! I'm brand new in here. I'll get to the point real quick...
I was dumb enough to buy a sony Viao from circuit city awhile back and after upgrading most of the components, I have discovered that this computer is not meant to be upgraded.... I have posted my issue a billion times and I think it is a mobo compatability problem. Basiclly, my system runs certain games in slow mo most of the time.
Before anyone tries to help with that issue, I have tried everything and the only way to get the games to work is by pulling the system battery and rebooting...Now that doesn't work anymore.... Something is re writting cmos/bios to make the system suck.
I have contacted sony and they said that my video card and ect... are not supported so you are S.O.L. I'm tired of restoring, defraging, updating and everything else and I'm almost possitive it is a processor/board issue. The sony guy also told me that the processer is "matched" to the mobo and I cant just buy a new motherboard. This is what I know about what I have...

3.2g pentium 4 hyperthreaded, 915g express chipset, 1.5g ram (1 gig is kingston hyper X 3200 184 pin 512X 2 the other half is stock), 7800gt aopen video card. 120gig hd, 550watt ps

the ram,video, ps and some case/fan work is the only thing that I have modded.

My question is, is it possible to use the processor and just get a new board?
Is an atholon better gaming wise? Any suggestions on maybe a combo that will work with the vid card and memory that is equil or better than I have now?
I am not real tech savy so please use lamens terms...
ANY help at all would be appriciated. Thanks

 

[dmill89]

To start with the sony guy is full of crap. All intel pentium 4 processers will work in any motherboard that supports them (socket 775 in your case.). However the Operateing System (Windows) is matched to the motherboard and you will need a new copy of windows if you replace the board. You will also need a new case and PSU as sony uses non-standard mounting holes and brackets.

An AMD athlon 64 3200+ or higher would preform better but realistically a 3.2GHZ Pentium 4 with a good video card and ram will run any game currently out fine.

If you do get a new motherboard I would recomend a board that supports the Intel Core 2 DUO (currently the best processr) so you can upgrade in the future if you wish.

 

[agent]

Ok, I somehow managed to get the games running again at full speed with settings maxed even! Is there something I can do besides creating a system resptore point that will save or keep the system how it is now so I don't kick the mother boards teeth in?

 

[dmill89]

You could back up the entire HDD but unless you have a tape drive or external HDD to back it up on you'll need alot of discs, posibly over 100 Cds or 20 DVDs depending on the amount of data you have on your HDD.