"pyotr filipivich" wrote

| Which brings me to the Eternal Issue: where can I find an
| "affordable" XP box which is also not on its last legs? Good Will /
| Value Village both have "good" prices but caveat emptor.
|

If you have a full license you can built it, but I'm
not sure if hardware is still available. At one point
I tried to buy a backup for my AMD FX-8300. (I have
a backup motherboard.) The price had gone way up.
Now I think they may be off the market. I haven't
really been keeping up with developments, but my
sense is that no cPUs now being sold will work
with XP.

If you buy used, I'd replace the hard disk. Most other
parts will last for years. On the other hand, Vista came
out in 2007, so any existing machine woul be 12-18
years old. Not encouraging. But I know of at least
3 people still using XP machines I fixed up for them.
For a long time I was taking any computer someone
wanted to get rid of, fixing it, and giving it to someone
else. (People tend to throw them away at the first
sign of trouble, but the problem is usually minor.)
That's how I got my Win7 box.