I have an old IBM ThinkPad 600E my sis gave me. It has an Intell PII 400 CPU, 95 meg of ram and a 10 gig hard disk. I want to run RedHAt Fedora Core on it, but i'm not sure which versions will give good performance on this hardware. I want to run as recent a version as possible, because it i'll be using SAMBA to connect it to my windows network (my server is running Windows XP Pro). Can anyone help me out?

Are you considering running the thinkpad as a desktop or server? The memory will be a limiting factor - Fedora, and most other Linux Distributions won't install a graphic environment (desktop) with less than 256 MB of memory. Even after it is installed, the desktop environment will be a slow performer. I'd recommend using a distro that was intended for a laptop with limited resources.

If you can install Fedora, it won't make much difference which version you select, they will all give about the same performance. The newer releases have better security features built into the software.

Thanx for the reply. I want to use the ThinkPad as a desktop. Though I am thinking of installing FC 10 or later on my server soon, and maybe as a sedcond OS on my HP Pavilion, just for kicks.

I was using Fedora on my laptop, but after a HD failure I attempted to install FC 10 (would have been an upgrade from FC9) but it wouldn't install. I switched to Ubuntu 9, and have since upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. I've had no problems with either OS except touchpad and bluetooth support. The touchpad randomly stops functioning with Ubuntu (I use an optical mouse to keep going) and I haven't been able to get bluetooth running on either OS though bluetooth is built into my laptop. Ubuntu does seem to run faster than Fedora though I really liked the help I received on the Fedora forums.

I'd recommend Puppy Linux ( http://puppylinux.org/ ) for this old hardware, but I have never tried setting it up as a file server. Fedora/Red Hat will work, but you will have to ditch the default Gnome environment to use the computer at an acceptable speed.

Never install an old version of any distribution. Unlike Windows, the speed of distributions increases with every release, and old versions do not have support or as many up to date applications available. Extra features in new releases that do hog resources are easy to disable.