Pontius
1) I don't think that you're in the Dark Ages - your PC (apart from being a bit short of memory) is the same as Ausatco's and my PII (except that mine is overclocked a bit to 250MHz. It zooms thru the Net, Java and all, just as Ausat says. Just moved up to a supersonic PIII with a whizzbang video card and am mildly disappointed that I don't see THAT much difference (except when working with huge complex images in Paint Shop Pro, which I do a lot. Even a max of 56K from the modem is Sooooooo sloooooow that a 386 could almost keep up.
2) The major benefit was really a complete reinstall of Win98SE. It cleared out an awful lot of cr*p from all sorts of early experiments and discarded programs and tho' it was a major major pain (I had to reinstall twice before I got a stable system) everything is silky smooth now. I'll do the PII when I've recovered. The irritation is finding the CDs and disks and downloaded installers for what you had and then working out what you REALLY need - my PacketCD disk mysteriously disappeared and I was shafted until PPRuNE (in the form of spannersatcx) found me the drivers. And don't forget all those passwords and CD codes...
So what I suggest is that you locate a friendly local PPRuNer in London (can't be too difficult) or an honest and intelligent computer dealer (almost impossible). Beef up your memory to 128MB (not expensive), buy a new hard drive (about 100GBP for a 20Gig), install Win98SE and get online again. You can still use your old harddrive and you can gradually shift the data to the new one.
Once Windows gets REALLY fouled up it is theoretically possible to fix it. In practice, a fresh install is often quicker and easier.
As for the BBC micro, my trusty Spectrum still runs - it still works hard 5/7 switching things on/off in the lab and recording/displaying data from a laser doppler flowmeter.
Good luck!
[edited to change inadvertent reference to WinME which I don't like, but may well be good for you unless you run any DOS games]
[This message has been edited by Mac the Knife (edited 13 March 2001).]