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Certainly reasonable to try to keep the old girl running a few more months till the economy picks up. I'll try to help but eventually some more info may be necessary.
1. Computer turning off randomly - Often this is caused by overheating and overheating is often caused by accumulation of dust sucked in by the cooling fans. If you haven't cleaned it in the last few months, it needs it no matter what. Here's the basics - turn it off, AND unplug it. Take off the cover-some cases are tricky most are very obvious, too many to describe. If it's full of dust bunnies you might want to take it outside cause it'll get messy. The preferred way is to used some 'canned air' available at office supply stores. Optionally, if you have a vaccum cleaner that you can reverse the hose to blow out, that'll work. Blow the dust out thoroughly. When you get close to any fan, hold it with your finger to keep it from spinning or you'll burn out the bearings. Spend a lot of time trying to blow out the power supply. This is harder because it's enclosed but by working around all the possible openings you can do ok. Be gentle and don't bang things around in there or you'll cause more trouble than you can imagine.
2. Ok, nice and clean? Inspect it inside. Make sure you didn't loosen any cables. Put the cover back on and plug everything back in and start it up. MAKE SURE ALL YOUR FANS ARE TURNING.
3. Check your hard drive. (A) Go to All Programs>Accessories>System Tools and run "Disk Cleanup". This gets rid of lots of junk. (B) Go to My Computer, right click on you C: drive and choose properties. It will show you how much disk space you have used and free. If you don't have at least 10% free you will have problems. You need to remove some old programs and probably copy any videos, music etc to a cd so you can delete them. After you delete a bunch, empty your recycle bin (those take up space) then check your disk space. After you have enough (C) on the same window click 'Tools' and "Check Now" use to options to automatically recover and to scan the whole drive. This will take awhile, 30 minutes to a few hours depending on you system. After that is successful, run 'Defragmentation' from the same screen, this arranges your files to make them more usable. Again this can take an hour or more depending.
4. So now you computer is sparkly clean and your drive is nice and neat. Time for program cleanup. Run a full virus scan. What's that? you don't have one? Shame on you. Go to AVG.com and get their free one (you'll get a million recommendation on here. AVG is free and good, your choice) What's that? you have several installed already? Shame on you. Pick one, the best one and uninstall all the other junk. Multiple virus scanners, multiple Anti-this and anti-that is the best way to bring your computer to it's knees. OK, now you're virus/malware free. Go to Malwarebytes.com and run their malware checker AND just as important run their "Startup Lite" - this is very good at stopping all the junk programs that automatically startup that you don't need. This can have a big impact and again Free.
5. Last - Update Update Update - Go to Microsoft.com and install ALL the XP updates. If you can, check your computer manufacturer for their updates (depending on how techie you are you can search for individual component updates too, including bios updates but your system may be too old to find them).
So now you should be clean all the way around. Reboot. At this point, if you continue having problems, especially random shutdowns your power supply may be going bad or you may be having other hardware failures. Some can be as cheap as a $40 video card or $50 power supply and some will cost more than your computer is worth.
Good luck with that. If you want to drop me an email with more info or questions, I'll try to answer.
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