Use fluxbox or Xfce, there a hell of a lot lighter than KDE or GNOME.
Also if your looking for a windows lookalike try www.xpde.com (its pretty light as well)

Yes, but KDE should run fine on a p3 700. It does here. I run KDE and then run RTCW over the top of it... There's something wrong when you can't run KDE on this sort of machine... I have mandrake 10 BTW... I have 12 virtual desktops, often full of stuff...

lol, there are lots of posts, but no one seems to have given much advice.

forst of all, fedora is more of a bloated distro, famous for its features and ease of use, not speed.

however, you can skim off the flab, and speed it up without going as drastic as a whole new distro.

FIRST... cd into /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/ these are shortcuts to programs that automatically run on bootup.
read up on what each ones are, and decide if you need them. there are probably about 30 in there, and i only need and use about 4 services.... which are network, random, iptables (firewall) and maybe one or 2 more.

this will make you boot time faster.

SECOND... install your graphics cards accellerated drivers, the generic drivers that come with linux are no way as fast as the accelerated ones, ESPECIALLY if you have a nvidia card !

THIRD.. read a tutorial, and re-compile your kernel. selecting the correct processor optimisations.

okay, maybt the 3rd is overkill... but definatly the first 2 !

Or, you might want to try Slackware 10. It's a little harder to use, but it's very fast. On a 366mHz computer with a 4 gB hard drive and 64 mB of RAM, it's really fast and when you run Xfce, it's a very nice system. If you want to try out Linux, the best thing to do is to try out different distributions.

read this guys posts.... he is stuck with dialup. and has the choise of..... Fedora core 2 or Windows XP

i assume he doesnt want to buy a distro....
(if you do, u can buy slackware for 0.99 $ on ebay)

i have dialup & buy my Linux distro's at this site

http://www.edmunds-enterprises.com/linux/index.php

Just wanted to add another data point:
FedoraC2/Gnome
Aopen AX3SP Pro mobo
800P-III with 512Mb RAM
20Gb drive
GeForce4MX440.
It opens apps and does net browsing/email stuff faster than when it ran W98SE. I gave it to a friend for his first Linux machine and he says it runs a bunch faster than his W98 machine. This is pretty subjective but if your not playing games or editing graphics this caliber of machine seems just fine.