I have been through the second and third phase many times over the years because I have been upgrading the same 'puter with new hard drives, new chips, more memory and so on for ages now.
Sadly I am now stuck in the terminal phase as I have gotten to the point of no return. Any further upgrades would require yet another new mother board and chip (and video card) which would cost about the same as a brand new desktop computer with an i17 chip, a TB hard drive and a GB of video memory.
Just holding on until I can scrape up the cash for the new unit. In the meantime, I have to hit pause and let a video load up before letting it play or else it starts and stops buffering its little heart out. 
Funny way with words.
I build a new machine every 12-18 months and give my old one to someone in the family or friends.
Gramps - you don't need an I7 chip to surf and do some office work. I've built a few of AMD 785 G ship machines this past year with on board video are are fantastic for surfing and office work and many games as well. I built one for ~$150 and the one for $300 and the other for $350 .. all depending on what parts that could be salvaged from their old machine (keyboard, mouse, monitor) You'll probably need a new Hard Drive as you probably have an IDE one - but you could still keep it. Shop at Frys or Newegg .. or have your local computer guy put it together for you.
Same here. I usually sell the old system to friends for cheap and most of the time it covers half the cost of the new system, so I'm happy.
Thanks for the advice, Big T, but I have been through a number of local computer guys over the years and the one I have now is telling me that I need so many new parts that a new machine would make more sense at this point.
I have been upgrading the computer I have now since 1992. Every single component, including the case, has been replaced many times over.
The i17 chip is just wish-list. I have been using AMD chips more than Intel chips for this computer and there is an AMD chip in there now, a 2.0 one if I remember correctly.
I would be happy with a cheap Core 2 Duo 8500/8600 chip and nice set of ATI Radeon Cards for crossfire addon to my existing system, but a i7 upgrade would be sweet!
effbee
Haha, that's pretty good. I upgrade mine before phase 3 though.