Worth getting Barton 2500 now that Athlon64 is here?

I run XP. About 7 or 8 months ago I was going to upgrade my ailing
700MHz Duron for a Barton 2500.

But has the attractiveness of the Barton 2500 approach disappeared
on account of Athlon 64 now being more popular these days?

I don't know much about Athlon 64 expect I have heard that
applications need to be specially writtten and/or compiled to tale
advantage of it. And I guess there is not a whole lot of those
applications around at the moment. But what about the future?

Seems to me that a Barton 2500 is a dead end. So I would not get a
new mobo but put it in my old mobo (Via 266 chipset and 768MB SD-
RAM). Is this the right way to go for now?

I bought a mobile 2500, and I'm glad I did. Sure, I could have gone with
the Athlon64, but my upgrade cost would have cost me twice as much for only
a marginal increase in performance. It depends on what your preference is
in the performance-vs-cost area.

As for the 2500 being a "dead end", I don't really look to future chip
upgrades when I buy a motherboard - I wait until I need an upgrade, then I
get the whole package. That way, I generally get more than just a faster
chip, I get faster memory, better interconnects, etc..

steve