When I read in your post that the computer was seven years old and running Win XP, it reminded me of my own situation up to about a year and a half or two ago. From 1999 until 2010 I had an IBM "Aptiva" computer, 128mb of RAM and a 600MHz processor, that was running....now catch this...
Windows 98SE, with IE6! 
That computer (which was TOTL when I bought it) worked well for me, however, until 2011 or so, when an old friend of mine, who was updating his accounting firm with Windows 7 systems, gave me a more-recent vintage system (tradenamed PowerSpec, a house brand for computers marketed by Micro Center of Columbus, Ohio) running Windows XP and IE8 (though I use Firefox most of the time), the computer and operating system I'm running now. I still have the old Win98SE system, mainly because I don't want to put it out for the trash (too much sensitive information still on the hard drive). I just had my PowerSpec computer cleaned up by Microsoft technicians using remote software (they did it all over the phone), and was amazed at the amount of junk they found. No wonder the system had been running so slowly and freezing, etc. Works like new now, though.
