Advice on upgrading an older PC

Hey, if you're offering to replace my PC free of charge, then you won't get any complaints from me. Seriously though, "useful life" is a completely subjective concept. It's going to be at least a year until I can afford to build a new PC and if $200 or so can keep my aging beauty running smoothly during that time, then what more could I ask for? It's exactly what I need and what I can afford.

Thanks for the advice, but if you're not actually going offer any assistance then please refrain from wasting my time. My time may not be valuable, but it's all I've got.

Did this computer used to run better?  Or are you reaching limits because of added complexities?  If it is the former, try cleaning up your Windows and making sure your hard drives have a fair amount of empty space on them.  Do you have adequate amounts of RAM now?

I'm not a Win 7 expert.  In XP you could get a lot of crud in your registry.  Systems also seem to accumulate all kinds of processes running which weren't there originally.  Cleaning up the registry and shutting down unnecessary processes might get your computer back up to speed.

Anti-virus programs are serious resource hogs.  Go offline and kill the anti-virus.  Maybe that will get the speed back up.  Running multiple anti-virus programs and/or firewalls can get exponentially weird and slow.

If a hard drive is too full it starts to slow down data movement.  Either prune out the junk or add a new drive with higher speed and more cache.  If you don't have much RAM, perhaps adding another few GB would speed up your system.

If your system just doesn't have enough horsepower, idk about the temporary processor upgrade.  $200 is a lot of cash for a short term fix which may not do all that you hope.  I'm not a guru on which processor might speed up your system sufficiently.  Perhaps you could sell your current system and just buy a faster system for the $200 difference.