Let me add, that I am running Linux Red Hat 7.3 KDE 3.0 on a AMD K62 300
with 256 Megs of RAM and a fast IBM Deskstar Ultra 100 7200 RPM hard drive.
This machine was originally a NAT and file server, running a  K62 550 with
384 megs of RAM, which at the time I thought was a marginal Linux PC. I
sold the 550 CPU and  a128 megs of the RAM, and I thought Linux would slow
down to a tedious level of performance for KDE desktop use.

However, I haven't really noticed much change. I do turn off most of the
KDE eye candy when I first install...but that is always been a personal
preference of mine. The biggest thing I don't like about XP, and the reason
I prefer Windows 2000 Pro, is all the eye candy and wizards that pop up in XP.

Performance has been good enough with this K62 300, that I am considering
installing Linux on my laptop = 233MMX with 128 megs of RAM, which is
currently running Windows 2000 Pro SP3 surprisingly quickly. Now these
installs wouldn't handle high speed games, or video, graphics, editing, ...
or any scientific analysis workstation use. Nor would it work for a busy
server. But for home, Internet, or small office server, and or desktop
machine, my K62 300 with 256K of RAM works fine.

Rode
The NOSPIN Group
http://freepctech.com


At 06:05 PM 10/7/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>I teach a class on UNIX using Linux as the environment. The computer lab
>consists of hand-me-downs from main campus. We found that Corel Linux
>seems the least resource hungry, but we were able to install Red Hat and
>Mandrake on the machines as well. These computers are 166MHz Pentium
>with 32MB RAM. Admittedly the graphic interface runs slowly, but it does
>run. I would not want it for a serious business machine, but for getting
>to know Linux is should be fine. Incidentally, we increased the RAM to
>64MB for some $10 and it did improve performance.
>
>Peter

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