My dear old PC is close to melt down!

I had a bad few hours tonight. My computer, a six year old Compaq Presario, using the ME operating system - has a habit of freezing now and then. I've been told by experts (a) to upgrade it (out of the question - too expensive) and (b) replace ME with XP or Vista (too complicated for me). They say that ME has always been unstable and notorious for freezing, but I've put up with it. When it gets too bad, I run Scandisk and Defrag, and Ad-Aware and Spybot, and the combination of all those seems to speed it up and stop the hiccups...for a few months. Then it starts all over again.

This week however, after doing all the maintenance stuff, it kept on freezing, and tonight I had another go with Spybot, but everytime I tried, the screen blacked out, then appeared blue, with error messages. Oh yes, I've heard the blue screen of death or whatever they call it! But I don't give up easily...so I ran a virus check. That went for well over an hour, without freezing once! I said to Ken, well, there can't be too much wrong with it! So I tried reading and sending a few emails and it was okay for a bit, then I got half a dozen of those damn blue screens again, all with different error messages! Eventually I just turned the power off, then on again after a minute, and it restarted okay, and here I am...so far, so good.

Does anyone reading this know what any of these error messages mean?
File AVV7RS(01)+00002745 Error:OE:0028 C0158B41
Or - OE:018888887:Bff8E64B
Or - OE28:C0030D12

I know there are websites where you can go which will tell you what they mean, but I just thought there might be a computer whizkid out there reading this....I also know the hard drive case needs to be opened up and given a good dust, but only one person has ever done this for me, and he hasn't been over here for a while...(Hint hint, you know who you are!). Ken says he isn't game to touch it, because if anything happened, he'd never hear the end of it!