Well, it was in reasonable fettle, but its minor idiosyncrasy which occasionally required a restart & went away for a while after a disc cleanup has rapidly developed into a major problem, making me fear an imminent disc failure or something equally fatal. Given the age of the machine, I decided replacement rather than upgrade was in order, & have bought a new one, which I'll collect tomorrow. This one is fully backed up.
However, I've been thinking of what's been written upthread about XP & reinstalls. Might it be worth trying to rescue this PC with a wipe & reinstall? I'll still use the new one as the main machine, but it could be handy to have a spare.
Symptoms of the major problem: starts up in a mess. Says it's had a major error. Sometimes starts, but asks if it should tell Microsoft about the problem. Sometimes the screen is scrambled on startup. If I watch it all the way through (it's slow starting up now), it often offers the option of last good configuration, normal start, etc. Selecting last good configuration works - except once, when it didn't, & after a couple of tries I went back to normal start, which worked.
Occasionally, it'll freeze up then blank the screen, & needs rebooting, mostly after CTRL-F - but usually CTRL-F works fine. Only seems to fail when used in Adobe Acrobat, & several documents are open.
It's XP, & 7 years old.
Opinions? Advice?