Physical memory dumping for windows XP?

Is it worth upgrading both the memory and hard drive on a 4 year old Windows XP Home computer now?

• I bought an economy class Windows XP (Home Edition) Celeron 1 GHz tower computer back in 2003 for only $265 that has a 20 GB hard drive and 640MB of memory. I could upgrade the memory to the machine's maximum 1 GB for about $60 and get a larger hard drive somewhere on sale for around $50. But I am wondering given my computer's age, is it worth spending $100 or so to upgrade those areas NOW or just forget about it and replace it down the road with a more powerful computer? When I say "down the road" it could very well mean one to two years from now or as much as five years or more... I have a pretty tight budget. My computer right now consumes 45% of memory when Windows XP fires up, and running three applications of any kind at the same time, the memory usage goes up to 80%. The hard drive is now 73% full. I am still VERY happy with this computer and wouldn't replace it unless something tragic happens to it. Would like to hear what you would do in my situation.

• Answer:

  Yes, if you are happy with the operation of the other hardware. I would suggest upgrading to XP Pro, it's gotten cheaper since Vista and is far better than home. As far as memory, get as much as you can afford. You could use the new drive as your data drive by moving your files to it. This also will allow XP to run faster. FYI, I am running Windows 2000 Server on a 400MHz celeron with 1GB memory and 3 hard drives. I use high end modeling and engineering software and it is slower than the new ones but it still works fine for home system.