I've salvaged my old netbook with Windows XP and have been able to access a couple of Bitcoins that a friend sent me back in 2011 (!) when he was getting into this new cryptocurrency thing. BTC was beyond my skill set then and just out of reach now -- the wallet.dat is running on Bitcoin Qt v. 0.8.5 beta.

The coins have 155140 confirmations but Qt is running 162 weeks behind -- it takes forever to load, and will never catch up to the network on this ancient machine (have kept it running for days now) -- would like to move the BTC somewhere else -- have tried sending a test amount (0.01 BTC) to a new Mycelium account on my phone but each time get this error:

Runaway exception A fatal error occured. Bitcoin can no longer continue safely and will quit. St13 runtime_error CDB() can't open database file wallet.dat error -30974

Am at a loss what to do next -- any help or straightforward advice on what steps to take in order to move the wallet.dat to another machine for an inexperienced Bitcoin layperson would be most welcome...

Thanks much