It runs along happily for a while, then crashes, then crashes straight away when I try to restart it. I have to reindex after that. I believe it's version 13. I tried 14 but it didn't work well, can't remember why. I've seen threads saying that 14 will hammer your hardware and, well, it's an old machine. It's running on an old Dell which frankly I'm doubting is up to it. It's Windows 10 - the great unknown! There's plenty of available disk space. I've reindexed and restarted a few times and I have a suspicion that it's crashing at around the same period which suggests a disk problem. Next on my list is to note where it crashes and then try again with the bitcoin directory in a new location. At the moment it's got up to 2 years 48 weeks behind. Thanks for your response :-)
One of my machines appeared to crash at 2 years and 48 weeks as well and I have no idea why.
You could try downgrading from version 13 to 12.2 (the archives are avaliable on the official bitcoin website).
If that fails and you need an alternative you could try something like electrum.org (so you have control of the private keys) or I think there are some lighter versions of bitcoin core (and also pruning avaliable so a smaller amount of the blockchain is stored).
