[wplug] The Minimalist Desktop

[Brian Sammon]

> I have an old p-100 machine with 16megs of ram (I will
> probably upgrade this), 850 mb harddrive, and 512k of
> video ram.  My question is: can someone suggest a

The most painful thing about a setup like this, in my experience, is the 
shortage of memory on the video card.  512k will limit you to 800x600 for 256 
colors and you might be able to get 1024x768 at 16 colors.  Both of these will 
lead to programs not being able to render images and icons well because they 
can't get all the colors they need (they're usually not very good about 
sharing).
To get 16-bit color, you'll have to go down to something like 560x420 or 
smaller.

If you have a PCI or Vesa slot on this computer, I'd suggest keeping your eyes 
open for a video card with at least 2MB of memory.  You should be able to find 
something at any price point-- you probably could get someone to give you an 
old card with 2MB of memory.