If you do, you'll have a computer
that will do web surfing email and photo's faster than ANY M$ Windo$e machine.

Install UBUNTU on your existing XP machine. You won't believe how fast it will turn on and off. The wear and tear on your hard-drive will be reduced by a factor of 20, I bet**.
You can have both XP and UBUNTU on your machine at the same time, just choose which to use at start-up. Bet, in short order, you will usually start UBUNTU.
NOTE: Many programs that are specific 'windows' programs, can be run by UBUNTU. The windows emulator called WINE can be installed. Then your windows specific program can be installed under WINE.

An example of how fast UBUNTU is. Dual core laptop with 3gig memory.
VI$TA takes around 3 minutes to become totally operational. IE: connected to the Wifi and ready to check email, or surf the web. Turning it off, total shutdown, requires in the neighborhood of a minute.
Starting UBUNTU, Wifi connection established, takes well under a minute. Shutdown occurs in approximately 10 seconds.

**whenever you click on just about anything in windo$e, it writes something  to the windo$e registry.
This 'registry' is on the hard drive.. Try watching your HDD activity light some time. It's flashing all the time. This is why M$ asked the HDD manufacturers to develop a 'faster' HDD a while back. To speed up Windo$e. It's a shame they had to rely on hardware to get faster. They should have done it in software. UBUNTU, and all 'flavors' of linux, do not rely on a 'registry' to operate. So there's nothing to write to the hard drive. The necessary info will be written once you close a window. And the data necessary is small compared to what windo$e requires.

I almost forgot to mention, UBUNTU is FREE. Just download it, Burn it to a disk**. Restart your computer to run it from the disk (this is slow but allow you to 'touch and feel) or install alongside or in place of Win??
**making the disk requires a solution for ISO files. ISORecorder works well

<UPDATE May 2014>
Since this page was created, I've tried a few other 'flavors' of Linux.
The latest is MINT. More specifically, Mint - Cinimaon.
From the desktop, it looks and feels a lot like Windoze.
It is based (built upon) the Ubuntu Linux release so it's just as stable.
Some NOTES on things I've done/found with Ubuntu and MINT/Cinimon.

If you're interested, but are skeptical of your ability, you can have me do it for you.
I can install UBUNTU alongside Windows for a 'Test Drive". You can "Check it out" surfing the web and checking your email. Plug in your camera and view your pictures.
If you don't like it, you old windows is available when you start your computer.
I will also explain a few other advantages you'll enjoy using Ubuntu or MINT.
My rates are very competitive.