Oh! - sorry about the delay - the update
We had an issue with the washing machine (well it was 10 years old) - the pump went, so we received the new one yesterday, anyway, I managed to solve the problem with the BSOD 0x0000007E, after doing a search and a fix by watching youtube, the suggestion was to check the hard drive for how full it was, so in safe mode, cleaned out a few old programs and programs that were not needed, this brought the disk space from a reported 1% to 9% in defrag, oh forgot to mention I had found an old full backup from 2012, which I was going to try and see if this would fix it, but it wouldn't load from the external drive while in safe mode, any way, once I removed this it went to 67% in defrag, note, before I had put the full backup on the C drive, the BSOD was still active, so the memory left over was not really the cause.
The youtube suggestion was to change an entry in the registry, but before I did that, I remembered that I had CCleaner on the old drive, so I ran that first, cleaned out old start up bits and fixed issues with the registry running it twice, then I changed the entry suggested.
So then I restarted the machine, and as it was going through the MS logo bit - lo and behold it went to the re-register the windows OS, which I duly did (remember the XP program and motherboard and chipset were all originally in this PC case) and now the PC works, it is never being connected to the Internet (flash drives will used to transfer drg files etc via that and this PC).
Just need to get a decent monitor and get the graphics card reinstalled.
Oh and the old SOD's law effect happened yesterday - to reinstall the graphics card it needs the disk - Sparkle computer for a Nvidia GT8500, well went looking for it - seriously need to weed out the old PC games and detritus built up over the years, well I couldn't find it Friday and Saturday - until that evening I looked it the case I had put the motherboard, chip and graphics card that were bought to update this machine, there in the case was the Sparkle installation disk, also in the packet was some of the disks for installing the programs that are also on the hard drive and low and behold the XP original disk and a recovery disk, doh.