Why not try something like a Dell Latitude 2100 with XP, instead? They generally run under $100 and the used computer market is saturated with them (they were intended for classrooms so Dell sold a bazillion of them, apparently). Nice little netbook with a 10" screen and a rubberized, easy to grip case (very hard for even my arthritic hands to drop). Most of them I'm seeing for sale have Windows 7 on them, though, but the one my wife bought several years ago had XP, so I know they'll run it.
I bought one for myself recently and converted it from a standard hard drive to a Crucial BX100 SSD drive, and added another gig of RAM to max it at 2GB. It's pretty snappy, all things considered. Screen's a little too small for PSK/JT modes, but if you had HyperTerminal on it, it would probably be just right for packet. (In fact that was my original rationale for buying it...I named it PACKY

) But I haven't gotten around to doing that yet, so I use it mostly to take minutes for lodge meetings now.