Phenomenal Cosmic Powers. Itty Bitty Living Space.

I’ve rediscovered some of my respect for Windows (the operating system) today.
I’ve been tinkering with my first desktop PC trying to squeeze just a little more juice out of it. Having been built in 1995, it’s a venerable old bucket o’ bolts, but it’s still got more computing power than the entire Apollo moon mission. Surely it could be useful for something around the house.
It’s been serving the kids well as a games machine for the past few months. However, being a 486 DX2 with a 340MB hard drive and 20M memory, it’s not exactly up the task of throwing polygons around the screen like it needs to these days: games have moved on. So, having found a disused laptop with more grunt, I’ve freed up a little piece of computing power.
I decided that it might be a good test bed for Linux. However, I haven’t found a useful Linux distribution which installs in less than 700MB. If anyone knows of one, I’d appreciate the pointer. I’ve tried a ‘live CD’ of Knoppix, which magically runs everything off the CD Rom, but even that’s too slow.
Now, having installed a fresh Windows 98, I’ve got it networked and patched, with good performance, with 150MB free to play with. I’ll turf the keyboard, mouse and monitor and remotely operate it with good old VNC. I’m thinking it might be a good jukebox for streaming music off Launchcast, or for keeping an eye on network traffic. Any ideas welcome.
I’m a little disappointed I couldn’t get Linux on there. I’d assumed it was more lightweight than Windows. But, it seems, when the chips are down, Windows can find its way onto any disk. Nice one, Gatsey.