Whoa!! Success with an older box!
 

I just finished installing Slackware 9.1 on my formerly mandrake 9.2 clunker box and I'm impressed. Install was not hard - ok I had to fuss with Xf86config a few times and go through some parts of the Slackware install more than once but that was it.
Now Slackware boots to a relatively loaded kde package a full minute quicker (1:47) than mandrake boots to a minimal icewm setup!
And it runs faster! Hefty apps like konqueror and kde gui config tools no longer take painfully long to load compared to galeon, firebird, menudrake under mandrake.
My machine: p233mmx with 96 meg, 4meg virge video
It's only been a few hours and I'm already happy!
-Joel

Sweet... I'm glad to hear it.

I just loaned my Slackware 9.1 CDs to a coworker of mine who has an older machine similar to yours that he wants to squeeze some better performance out of than he can get by using Windows on it.

I'm a bit more confident now that Slack might work for him on it. :)

I fondly remember the win98 days... the system wide purges every 6 months to "reclaim" space the operating system magically appropriates, the frequent crashes and inexplicable blue screens, the terrible multi-tasking (win2000 on a p2-350 is FASTER than win98 on the same machine). Your system might run slightly faster on windows 98 (although I'm sure that you could tweak the kernel and apps to make it faster)...

but with slackware you get peace of mind.

Just make sure he's not running anything he doesn't need (sshd,sendmail,ftpd,nearly everything out of inetd) and keeps his packages updated :-)

Best,
techguy