[TomGuy]

Tell your relative to cough up a couple hundred bucks and buy a new XP machine

PC's are cheap enough now that buying a more current one costs less than repairing an old one.

I kept telling a relative that. It finally sunk in. He was paying $100 plus for every service repair (which were things like installing a new modem).

Some of the reconditioned and recertified ones are around $300 with OS. The OS (usually WinXP) costs $125, so the pc actually only costs around $175. That's not bad at all. I have been considering buying one just to put some version of Linux on to play around with it.

[PeterFinn]

Dell usually sells PCs for $400-$500 including flat panel monitors. Tough to beat that deal. You can’t even build your own that cheap.