It depends alot on how you treat your computer. I have an old PII 400 mhz with 384 mb of RAM and WinXP and it runs just as well if not better than it did the day it was bought (1998). As long as you dont clog up your drive with loads of useless programs and make sure you defrag and scan for viruses you should be all right. Also, make sure you have a good power supply, I've had a few hard drives and mobos that have been fried by bad or inadequately powerful power supplies. If you are looking for a computer at a rock bottom price and you don't want to physically assemble it yourself, check out http://maincomp.com You can specify each component you want and they will put it together for you. Its the cheapest and most reliable solution I've found. In fact, I've bought about 10 or 12 computers from them for my office.
My suggestion would be to back up everything that you want to save. Then do a fresh install of winxp. Simply boot from the xp setup disk, and then delete the partition, and reformat with ntfs, not ntfs quick.....then the install will proceed.....it should take about 45 minutes in total. I bet this would drastically improve your system. Another suggestion would to be install as much memory in your computer as possible. Go to crucial.com and you can run a memory test which will tell you what type of memory your computer needs and how much it can take.
Yes just tried to install Norton Systemworks Pro. What a POS imo. System bluescreen crashes and tons of error messages. After many hours of install and clean reinstall, no luck getting it to work.
Or you could use linux ... if your trading platform allows .... no blue screens, no anti-virus issues, no forced updates/upgrades or ridiculous and onerous license requirements .... Just stable, easy to maintain and free. I wish we had dumped $soft years ago .....
Makes sense. If you absolutely want to keep your old hardware, get one of those (free) linux livecd's (eg Knoppix, Suse, Ubuntu, ...) This at least will give you a quick validation of the health of your hardware, this WITHOUT having to install a new OS on your disk.