Based on your profile, you should tell Grandma to kick down the gaming system with 1.5 gig and give her the Celeron.
hehe
That Asus motherboard you have has two problems:
1) It's only 400mhz FSB
2) It only has single-channel PC-2100 memory support.
This severely limits not only the P4's you can install, but also assures it will cripple them with poor memory bandwidth and performance.
You can still get a measurable improvement in performance, but you wont be able to enjoy the full potential of a P4 upgrade on that mainboard.
My best suggestion would be to:
1) Pick up 2x512 of the LOWEST latency PC-2100 ddr memory you can find.
2) Find a Northwood P4-2.4/400mhz Socket 478 processor.
Finding 400mhz P4's will not be easy so you'll likely have to go to lower-end sources (check
www.pricewatch.com. You can also go to a P4-2.8 ghz, but realize due to the memory bus on that mainboard, there will be very little gain between the 2.4 and 2.8. Still, if you can find a Northwood 2.8/400 for like $5-$10 more, go for it.. else it's not worth a big price difference.
On memories- you can expect best performance if you can find some CAS2 DDR memories. These will squeek the most from the already crippled 400mhz, single channel bus. I'd recommend google/download cpu-z and run it. This will allow you to see your installed memory. If you can screenshot/post your CPU-Z tabs here, it would help. Otherwise, you can also use it's register dump to a file and cut/paste it in a post here.
