OK, so I have a junky Pentium I - 160mghrtz computer with 128MB ram, a generic 1MB video card, 15 inch monitor, no speakers hooked up, and a network connection. I installed Redhat 9 on this computer.

Now, right next to that computer is my nice 900Mghtz AMD Athlon with 512MB, ATI Radeon 64MB DDR, 19inch monitor, SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS, and lots of periphereals running Windows XP.

I know it is possible to remote connect to my Linux box from my windows box using like telnet and probably some other programs too. However, my hypothetical question is - is it possible to remote connect to my linux box from my windows box, and somehow be able to use the power of the hardware on my windows machine to run programs on my linux box through my windows machine? So for instance, if I want to run the media player in gnome - obviously I can't do that on my linux box by itself. But say I remote connect to the linux box and linux can detect the hardware on my windows box and use it's resources to power the linux video player so that I can see it on my 19inch monitor and hear it on my soundblaster.

Why would I want to do this? Well, right now I am just new to linux and I'm taking it for a test run. I like having my good machine with windows on it for now, and I do not even want to install a dual boot for fear of royally screwing up windows. However, if I can test the linux applications as they would run with my hardware I might eventually be willing to dual boot or even switch if I know that I could get many of my applications to run and if I feel comfortable with linux.

I would understand if this is not possible and if you think I'm crazy for even asking. However, if anyone has attempted this or even accomplished it, I would love to know how, no matter how difficult.

There isn't any way to "run" apps on your Linux box "through" your doz box motherboard/CPU. Any connection between the two would result in performance limited to the speed of the network/port connection which will become the bottleneck and speed limiting factor. The closest I can think of is to run Slack zip (runs entirely in doz, no need to partition http://www.slackware.com ) in your doz machine, but I am not sure if the exact Red Hat Linux apps that you wanna try are included in Slack zip.

If you want to use something like Remote Desktop in Windows XP Professional. There are programs that you can access a computer over the network on the computer you are on. The disadvantage of these programs is that the slave computer does the work (displaying the graphics --> taking snapshot of graphics --> compressing graphic snapshot --> send over network to master) instead the master computer. No your faster computer can not run the programs unless its running linux and the slave is running NFS (I think).

Use Knoppix if you don't feel like installing LINUX with your Windows partitions.