Found dead on the road

[genso]

howdy yall, I'm new here so I'm probably putting this in the wrong spot. I inherited an 8 year old dell dimension 4100 pc which I'm trying to fix for my kids. I runs ok and has xp service pack 2 and has 512 ram it is only 930 mb for speed and it must be the slowest pc I've ever seen. You can't do more than one thing at a time with it and when online it takes an eternity for pages to load...I have dial-up. I have been trying all kinds of tricks and tips to speed it a little but nothing so far has helped. The relative I got it from is deceased and I suspect he had many hidden files on it because I can't keep the deleted temp files from returning each time I reboot it...should I dump this devil or is it salvageable?

 

[dividebyzero]

If you have the XP install disc and the COA sticker on the case then you could reinstall the operating system. That would make it as fast as it's gonna get (unless you drop it off a cliff). It would automatically exorcise the bad juju/file problem, and you'd have a fresh, clean XP.
If the harddrive is as old as the rest of the system then I'd probably look at getting a replacement -even a small one- as the years usually aren't too kind to them. If you don't want the expense then you can run a Windows utility called Checkdisc that will check to see if the harddrive is damaged at all. If it passes then it's just a matter of backing up whatever you want to keep onto a flash drive/CD/DVD/External harddrive and popping the XP Operating System disc into the CD/DVD drive then a few simple steps.
Post back if this is something that fits the bill for you.