Help me dumpster dive

[SteveDallas]

The Dallas family has one computer that gets fairly heavy use... it's a home-built system with an Athon XP 2200+ processor and 768MB of RAM. The kidlets are at the stage where we're considering another computer for them, but it has to be done on a stringent budget. I see two options:

1. Take the old computer, 233MHz Pentium MMX and make something out of it.

2. Buy an upgrade for the grownups and give the kids the 2200 system.


Now for #1 what I've envisioned is running Damn Small Linux. It boots up well on old hardware and runs much faster than Winblows on the same hardware. It would give the kids Firefox and a basic word processor and paint program. Perfectly good. The problem is I'm not getting it to work 100%... it doesn't handle text properly when running flash applications, and that spells trouble for using Millsberry and Yahooligans. I'm sure this could be fixed with proper setup but it's past me and I'm not getting feedback from the DSL forum. At any rate these are remain critical apps... I'm not married to DSL though I'm liking it a lot as I try it out. What other options would you explore for a bare-bones linux distro for this purpose (which, may have the same problematic font options)? I'm running Fedora Core at work but that's different because I have new hardware and do 99% of my stuff at the command line.

For #2 I've got a spare CD drive, 40GB hard drive, and 17" monitor, so I'm looking at a case, motherboard, CPU, and memory (assuming sound, video, and network intergarted on the motherboard). These caught my eye.

http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16813131512
http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16819104241
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820145505

Even at that pricing I'm not sold... would rather do #1 and wait for another couple hardware cycles to pass. But it has to be a noticable upgrade from what we have now or it's not worth the effort.

Thoughts?