Upgrade RAM on current PC or start fresh?

The PC in question is an eMachins T3065. It has 512MB 333 DDR RAM right now and an AMD Athlon XP processor (around 2.171 GHz). My question is should I spend the recommended $130 for an upgrade in RAM from Crucial (which would give me 3GB's) or should I buy a referb from retrobox that has DDR2 and a P4 3.4GHz processor (costs around $210) and toss in another $60 to give it a total of 2GB of RAM? I'm poor so whichever is most cost effective would be the way I wanna go. Thanks for reading.

 

Can you shed some light on why you feel the need to jump from 512MB to 3GB? Do you have any empty memory slot(s) now, with your 512MB installed?

 

I have 3 empty memory slots I believe right now. The reason I would upgrade to 3 GB of RAM is because the options are upgrading to 1GB which would be minimal improvement I think and the next option is 2GB which is the same cost as 3GB of RAM on crucial.com so that's how I arrived at the conclusion of 3GB.

 

Any particular reason why you're upgrading? I mean, we all want to go faster, but are you gaming? Has the PC slowed down? Your current specs are enough to run XP just fine without lag. If it's too slow, you probably have other issues. If you're gaming, then the faster PC is the way to go.

 

Ya, I do lots of gaming, though I dont know if it's the most intense games (World of Warcraft, Half Life, F.E.A.R., etc.). Thanks for the advice, I'll save the money and look for a newer faster one.
Thanks!