I heard a funny story about how if our cars were like Microsoft Windows, we could be driving down a highway and the car would suddenly stall for no reason and, once we came to a stop, simply restarting it fixes the problem and we can continue down the road again. There were some other analogies, too. Hope everything keeps running smoothly for you.
I can remember when there was no such thing as PCs. All computing got done on mainframes that took up a huge room and programs got into it by loading a huge deck of card-punch stock into a reader and running it through. Three-hundred baud dumb terminals were the norm then we went to 1200!. Now here I type on a laptop that has more memory than some of those mainframes had. It's an HP Pavilion running Windows XP that we bought over seven years ago. When it kicks the dust, I guess I'll upgrade, but until then...
Well, this was something that was not normal. PC are just parts, and the steps should have located the problem.
Yes, keep running XP, the most popular OS ever made. Not much reason to switch except for the 64 bit advantage.