by Void Main » Thu Jan 23, 2003 2:47 pm
If it were mine and wanted to run a GUI on it I certainly would try and scrape up some more memory somewhere. I usually don't find it very hard finding memory for older machines like that as many people have upgraded and have old machines that they just give away. I would try and boost it up to 128MB if at all possible. It's still going to be plenty slow (compared to other machines being built today) but it should work. Personally after using a fast Athlon based machine for so long I don't believe I could go back to using a machine like that for a desktop machine. As mentioned, not using KDE or Gnome but opting for something like WindowMaker, Blackbox, etc for a window manager will make things seem snappier. Large apps (like OpenOffice) would still be painfully slow (again comparitively if you've used a modern fast machine for any length of time).
I usually use machines with specs at that level for special purpose machines. It would make a great gateway, firewall, proxy, DNS, DHCP, and/or Samba server, or most any other server type of setup that doesn't require a GUI or a lot of memory/processor to function optimally. But for a desktop system it's going to be weak.