okay,

my old motherboard toasted, and while the old RAM is still good, I think it's
time to upgrade the board. Trouble is, I'm on a very limited budget here.

Anyhow, I have a monitor and a good shell with 500w power supply, 100 GB IDE drive [yeah, yeah I know IDE] and want to basically move to Vista Ultimate with some halfway normal performance. The old machine used to handle XP on a 2.x GHZ board [not dual core either. Had it for a few years].
Any suggestions that is under $250 that can get the motherboard end operational ? the software is a "gee maybe I can save enough for it by christmas", I'm going to run XP, but I want it capable of handling vista at a reasonable speed, aka don't want it to be click a button, get a cup of coffee, come back and click again slow.......

Thanks guys !