Thank you one and all for the replies, much appreciated.
Some more info on the machine itself. I have absolutely no problems with it's speed
or storage capacity. It starts up quite quickly and never noticeably slows while carrying
out any task. My only concern is I feel something fairly major is failing inside it.
With increasing frequency I'm starting to get problems starting up where the monitor won't
automatically switch on even though you can hear the computer starting up. After resetting
to rectify this I get the black screen message telling me windows has recovered from a major
fault and needs to check stuff before continuing.
In all I'd say this has probably happened about 6 times in the last month. When the machine does it's
check and then starts as normal everything performs flawlessly again.

On another totally unrelated note, while I have ye here, is there a way to get an old laptop running xp
working again when you've forgotten the user and admin log in passwords?