Few years old Dell laptop, they are incredible, even easy to open and repair, parts available everywhere, BIOS update even after 5 or 6 years.
You can buy a few years old Latitude for maybe $200, 14", i5 8th gen, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, wifi, bt, webcam, usb-c, name it.
Being 8th gen it runs win11, but they also run Linux pretty well, I’m running MX Linux (debian based) on them and everything is supported.
At least if you want to play with it in XP, install mypal browser https://www.mypal-browser.org/ I have had success with it on a XP machine, it loads facebook, reddit, lemmy.world, etc.
For an old distro, have you tried AntiX 32 bits?