Hey Jim,
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I'm a little late to the party here, but what about just fixing the original PC? You didn't mention the type of kaput-ness involved, which could be a number of things ranging from trivial to fatal. My dreaded worst case PC failures have always been HDDs losing boot sector or crapping out entirely, so having to redo the OS and all programs and trying to recover lost data. Power supplies and other drives and such are trivial, being mostly easy to replace commodities. If the OS HDD is still good, of course it's simplest to just park a fresh PC around it and tweak it to match the new HW details.
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I even fixed a huge Dell XPS400 motherboard a few years back. It suffered from the same sorts of things as other gear - bad electrolytic caps - and I could see it coming for over a year in advance as more and more paralleled caps gradually puffed up and blew their tops until there just wasn't enough C anymore. When it finally went down, I had to pull the board, and replaced several dozen caps throughout. It was tricky in many spots, where way undersized pads for caps had to be cooked out adjacent extremely skinny signal runs without wrecking anything on these multilayered boards - they are not laid out well at all for such service. It worked though, and continues to do so, with no signs of problems with the fresh caps. However, the usual problem happened again recently - the OS HDD crapped out entirely, with no spin-up or anything. I reloaded it with a new one and it's up and running, but not used much now. I keep a number of old PC types as spares mainly for legacy ports, programs, and devices, running on WinXPSP2. My "modern" PCs (one tower, two laptops) are on Win10/11.
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So anyway, maybe you can fix the original, depending on what's wrong - nothing to lose in trying. Good luck.
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Ed
