That usually happens when there is a death, right? In this case it was the death of two 'puters and I inherited the remains. Cleaned up the HDD and then test run the first, was behaving for a while, but then conked out to the “Blue Screen of Death” too often. Good for parts.
Cleaned the other “dead machine” and it behaves very nicely; 2.11G AMD processor, 1G ram, 500G HDD running XP SP3. It is now my MRR 'puter sitting on the bench in the garage ready to be interfaced with all the good stuff that is planned and/or already in house.
All this free of charge and a bit of work added in.