So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

[Michael Wiktowy]

On Sun, Apr 27, 2008 at 8:44 PM, Antonio Olivares
<olivares14031 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  Take it for a spin if there is still time.  A friend
>  of mine has two old machines in that situation, but I
>  still consider that even Xubuntu will not run on them
>  old PII with 64 MB ram :(  Tried to boot Slitaz, but
>  it failed to boot :(, DSL and Austrumi work, but I
>  cannot get machines to identify the network and
>  connect.

The amount of RAM seems to be the biggest issue with running distros
on older systems. There is not really a hard lower limit on CPU/ disk
access speed, things will just run linearly slower ... and will get
unbearably slow soon enough. But if you don't have sufficient RAM, you
are done. Lots of RAM will compensate a lot (but not totally) for a
slow CPU/disk access in a lot of desktop usage situations. Hard-care
gaming and number crunching is a whole other world though.

I have found that you need at least 256 MB of RAM. I think the stated
minimum is 192 MB or something like that but any machine will run like
molasses in January if it has to constantly seek to the hard-drive for
everything it does every time it does it. Slow old hard-drives/CD-ROMs
just exacerbate the problem.

/Mike