Cheapest yet Best Upgrade?

There isn't really much to upgrade... I think your best bet may be to wait until you can spend more and start fresh.

Dont get me wrong but i personally think that Nvidia GPU cards are much better for gaming. ATI have very fast gpu's but this is because there memory bus is low(not Memory RAM). were this is important for gaming. i have the GTX285 XFX i was going to get 4870 but the gtx285 memory bus is doubled even though the speed of the ATI isnt even doubled.

Yeah, SSDs are faster.
OK, no gaming means for your purposes a much faster cpu is needed.
Sorry, this means an Intel I7 system.

I don't understand people that suggest such exaggerated and exorbitant upgrades when he has clearly stated that he is tight on money.

I think that a memory upgrade will be the most noticeable and cost effective solution for you. I am not sure if you have the 64-bit version of Win7 or not but if you do, you should definitely bump your RAM up to 4GB. If not then I would say at least add another 1GB of RAM so that you have 2GB total. RAM is VERY cheap these days and having an operating system like Win7 will benefit tremendously from the added memory.

Solid State Drives are faster than hard drives but, without the RAM and processor power to back up those speeds, the SSD's potential will not be fully realized (not to mention they cost a pretty penny for not much disk space).

My 2 cents

Please don't tell me you bought a flashdrive instead of actual stick of desktop RAM...

Hmm not too sure how tight is tight but perhaps a "warp speed" from the world of DDR to DDR3 is within grasp Other than a LGA 1366 being futureproof with i9 running on it you also have Thuban x6 on AM3 platforms so your small investment might see ya thru a while