How do you get past the pops and hiss of LPs?

I recently grabbed from the janitor's basement a huge oldies collection with albums from 60's and played it on my Michell. They looked ugly but sounded with very small surface noise only at the beginning and almost nothing was heard in the middle or end of record.
Arm/cartridge plays the vast role in analogue setup on that issue.
I even have records with deep cuts playing descent with only a small pop.
Aged cartridges will certainly make a noise on even mint records so the cartridge replacement should stay first.

Kevin,
You don't have to get a multi-kilobuck analogue rig to have your records sound quiet.
I set up to my nephiew an analogue with cheap Dual turntable $20 from ebay, $20 Audiotechnica cartridge bought new right after the turntable, "amputated" auto return mechanizm to make it manual... $1 Records he's got from the different garage sale basements sound increadible with no clicks noise and pops.
He's now using RadioShack battery-powered phonostage. Overall the analogue setup was less than $100 including phono. To beat this setup you should realy get CD-player above $200 used or $400 new. Having Thorens table it's more than possible to bring it back alive with carefull cartridge and arm setup. Go to www.turntablebasics.com, examine your cartridge's condition or better-off replace it for any descent new one since cartridge ages when it's not played. I'd recommend looking-up www.turntablebasics.com for proper setup.

Folks who say to get CDs are partially right.
It's realy easy to built a nice sounding system arround CD-player where you can use pocket one with line-out connected to the Grado Headphone system and it will sound nice and this is where you can't do the same arround records.

Analogue playback setup needs EFFORT much more than money!
Records as well as CDs should be properly STORED and PLAYED thus will need almost no cleaning(well only sweeping before placing styli). As I remember using cartriges with replacable styli I was change it real often not to create further damage to vinyls. Tracking and alignment plays the vast role in this case as well.
Applying a large effort to clean already damaged records probably used as sleepers or stored with no inner sleeves in one carton jacket or any other kind of mis-use with bad styli, improper cueing can only bring little-to-no success.

Having to shop for the loved records either online or in local stores, checking condition and than taking proper care of the new "normal" collection, without even thinking or examining replacing an old cartrige or styli, also having possible replacement of an old tonearm aged throughout years for even any cheap new will eliminate the vast vast noise from your records.