[nide44]

I've an older Dell Pentium(r) II (98SE) with plenty of HD - 60 Gigs (for my purposes) but is short on RAM (256.0 Megs), and is lately giving me start up and shut down problems that have never happened before.
I've firewalls(SG/ZA), malware (AdAware/SpywareBlster),and Virus pgms (Avast!/AVG) and run them frequently (as well as running in the background).
It frequently shows me that I only have 32-45% of available resources (when I'm on-line) when I look at 'my computer/properties'.

Lately it just starts up and then shuts down all by itself.
It never gets to my desktop, just shuts off during the start up.
It also will , on occasion, start in safe mode instead of normal (and my desktop jumbles around and has to be re organized).
I often get a screen that tells me my display properties are wrong and need to be adjusted to the setting it chooses (no options to change it).
Yesterday, it gave me the blue screen of 'fatal error' when I hit 'print' for a Word file (I was on-line at the time).
It frequently does that randomly, too.
I can only run Scandisk in safe mode, because something is running that causes it to start over and over ("......10 times-do you wish to continue to receive this message?") and won't finish. I've shut down everything (except Explorer) in 'close program'- ctrl/alt/del, but it keeps happening, anyway.
I know I should just get another newer CPU with XP and plenty of RAM, but finances are tight right now. Is there anything I can do?