So basically what your saying is none of my equipment is any good?
no I said it was a dead end, i.e. upgrades will end up costing more than buying a new cpu/motherboard/ram in the end... to get something that is 313.65% faster
i.e. Your I3/motherboard 4gb of ram spending 150$ on it, IMHO is wasting money, but is a possibility to get it going for now (as explained above)
you could get a i5-8400/motherboard/ram for 3-400$ and instead of a dual core or quad core 1st gen cpu you would have a 6 core 8th gen cpu, motherboard and DDR4 ram …
But... spending 100-150$ to get it going to do an upgrade in a year or two is a viable solution and why I suggested what I did.
As informational PassMark scores below your current i3-550 the upgrade possible to the I7-880 versus the I5-8400 as follow.
as you see the difference only based on a cpu is Massive. and not taking in consideration that current 8th gen motherboard can handle at least 2x times more pathways on the main bus and process information twice as fast on top of it.
does it make sense to spend 150$ for a couple of year to perform a proper upgrade.. yes
does it make sense to upgrade the old system IF (and this is your pocket not mine) you have the money or rather wait to not waste any monies.
I would choose the second option.