You had an Athlon 2100 in the year 2001?
What did that cost, $5000?
Anyway, my advice would be to stick with Windows XP for the foreseeable future - you shouldn't have any problem going with that OS for another five years or more [we're still on Windows 2000 and cruising comfortably for the near future].
It looks to my eye as though most of your stuff would transfer over to a "new" system perfectly well [although more on "new" systems in just a moment].
Your biggest problem in "upgrading" to something more modern would be the power supply - the old 300W/400W power supplies from that era just won't cut it anymore. New systems are up around 750W [single rail] these days, and will have entirely different connectors [EPS12V to the mobo & PCIE to the peripherals].
Once you upgrade the power supply, then you have to upgrade the case, and, for quality parts, you're looking at $300+ right there.
If I were you, I'd look to maybe upgrade to dual Athlon MP's, and hope to keep the same case & power supply.
But whatever I did, I would not purchase new - I would purchase used off of Craig's List and eBay. Purchasing new just means you're eating the depreciation for parts that, on average [your own experience with the Soyo notwithstanding] tend to last approximately forever.
For instance, I just typed "dual athlon tyan" at eBay, and the first hit I got was some guy selling a dual mobo with 2 X 1900 CPU's for $149 [and there are a couple more after that with no bids at $10]:
http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?satitle=dual+athlon+tyanAnd I've seen 2 X 2800 Athlon MP combos on ebay in the low- to mid- $200s.
Here's a similar search at Craig's List:
http://www.google.com/search?q=athlon+mp+site%3Acraigslist.orgOne final thought - nothing, and I mean NOTHING - will improve your productivity more than getting dual [and preferably triple] monitors.
You can pick up beautiful old 21" CRT monitors on Craig's List for like $30-$50 - monitors which would have cost $750 to $1500 back in 2001, and get some inexpensive PCI graphics cards and string them all together on your desktop for total real estate of like {4800 X 1200} [= {1600, 1200} + {1600, 1200} + {1600, 1200}], on a total budget of no more than about $150 to $200.
Before I did anything else in the way of computer upgrades, I'd get myself triple monitors.
Looking at Newegg on the processor:
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On the Motherboard
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The motherboard has an integrated graphics adapter....does require DDR2 Memory...
Some of the reader reviews seem to indicate working with Vista....so windows XP should work,...most Linux distros will work...Ubuntu works for me on an ECS board with the 6100.