I dont know your funding situation but all the advice is good above. If you do decide to install a new operating system then also think about get an SSD drive as your system drive. This significantly speeds up your whole system. The price has come down and you dont need a big one if you are going to use it just for system files.
For me, I would be concerned abut sticking with XP. As an operating system its pretty good, but support for XP is being dropped. Win 7 is a really stable operating system, but currently more expensive than win 8. Running in 64 bit is important if you intend to use VST's of the heavy duty kind - the sample based types.
I thought about win 8 and even tried to install it. I bought it at £25 UK, however, my monitors do not support the resolution required. All the metro apps simply crashed my system. There is a compatibility wizard on the microsoft site which checks out your system ( this sometimes gives innactuate info), but if you are building for Win 8 you had better do some homework first. I had a list of ten of my applications that were not supported. None of these issues with win 7.

IMO (only) if you get down and dirty with a MOBO its best to get as future proof as possible - maybe hand on for Santa Claus?

Last edited by ZeroZero; 12/20/12 03:57 AM.
Win 11 64, Asus Rog Strix z390 mobo, 64 gig RAM, 8700k