Experimenting with Hardware

So over the weekend I acquired a computer that has dismal specs (at best). It is a 333 Mhz PII (w/ MMX Technology!!) and 384 MB of RAM (can anyone say SDRAM?).

I used a boot CD to load Puppy Linux on it over the weekend. I was amazed at how simple it was. I downloaded the ISO from the internet and burned it to a CD. Just boot from the CD and voila. It installed and started running very quickly. Puppy Linux ran pretty good but every time I attempted to stream video with Firefox the system crashed. I was really surprised how well the OS ran despite the old hardware. If I needed a simple box to check email and look up stuff on the internet, you could do it very easily with Puppy Linux despite the hardware.

This evening I tried a different distribution of Linux called Damn Small Linux (DSL for short). Again, I'm very surprised how responsive the OS despite the hardware specs. I am having difficult loading flash on the computer. Linux appears to have a little different way of installing software. A novice computer user would have a little difficulty switching from Windows to Linux. I'm starting to get the hang of it, but it's still somewhat foreign to me.

I do realize that even if I do get streaming video to work with this hardware, the results will be abysmal at best. For now, I am simply trying to test the theory before sinking a bunch of money into this project.