A good way to do work with XP appears to be to get an external drive that has a very large capacity such as a terabyte. Then copy the entire working drive to the external drive now and then. The computer can be told to do that overnight.

Then if the software crashes the entire drive can be copied back to the original hard drive. Windows XP doesn't take up that much room.

Another approach is to identify critically important files and directories and just copy them to the external drive every week or two. One of my programs does that automatically

The tower computer that I use for all of my report writing crashed a week ago. It looks like it is either a CPU or hard drive failure after many years of use. XP can't seem to repair it. But I had saved all of my important files. So nothing was lost. I just need to get a replacement computer. A backup one that I am using temporarily is running Windows 98. Wow! What a step back in time and performance.

XP is probably the oldest program that anyone would realy want to use. But the Windows 98 computer will do my Fax work okay. So it is being used until a replacement is secured.