jiien said:I'm just going to guess, as I'm sure people here will know better than me, but for 200ish dollars, you're looking at building another computer of the roughly the same specs, not really an upgrade. Can you determine which parts of it are dying/dead? You might be better off replacing specific parts, rather than building a whole new computer.
Hm, just looking at Newegg, a dual core 3.0 GHz and motherboard combo is already half of your budget. And looking at prebuilt, the only thing nearly that low are Atom-like machines. :T Maybe someone else can chip in.
There's more to CPU power than just cores and clock speeds. Even a budget Athlon II X2 will be much faster than a P4. He really needs to either increase his budget or reclaim more parts from the old machine. If he can reuse his case and PSU at least that will help. You can do CPU/MB/Memory for 200-250 but Intel really is not the way to go at that price point. You'll come out a lot better if you can convince him to go AMD.