If you like tinkering, plough on
. But from recent posts, just sounded like you were out of your depth by some margin.
From what you say, I wouldn't bother with a discrete video card, not needed to run Office and general workloads. Discrete video cards do cause reliability issues, and use a shit load of power in running and cooling. Only need one for gaming, esp now crypto mining is a thing of the past (ok, maybe not, but dying fast
)
But FFS move on from Office 97. More bugs than a Libyan coffee shop, most of which allow system level access to any rogue website. If you don't like newer versions of MS Office, there are plenty of other supported office suites. Don't rely on one that went out of support 20yrs ago!!!
Personally, I'm a Microsoft 365 user, so always get the latest version across 5 PC/Macs per account included in my subscription. I see it as free, because I am got it for the cloud storage.
If you are only a lightweight user of Word/Excel/PPT etc, the online versions are free, and run within the browser. More powerful than Office 97 as well, but probably ties you more to MS Edge than other browsers (though both Chrome (obviously) and Firefox seem to work OK in my limited use of it). Not sure if you can load and save outside of OneDrive storage though... ...but thats not really a problem.