A friend of mine gave me his 5+ year old P3/550 MHz pc to work on because it is overheating and has been for years...it's an emachine. I put another power pack (3rd one-but doubled to 350W) in there and cleaned it out. Already it is getting hot, though.

His OS is Win98. I booted with Slax and noticed that his pc only overheats in a GUI mode-not in console. I'm thinking he needs a light gui like xfce4. He has a 15 GB harddrive that I could repartition so that he could dual boot Win and Linux. I'm wondering, since he already has Win98 on there (the Win GUI make it overheat) could I put zip slack on top of Win with xfce as the GUI??

Yes, you can install ZipSlack on a FAT32 formatted drive, and it won't mess up Win98 at all. No need to repartition.

In order to install Xfce on top of ZipSlack, you will need to install X and whatever other libraries Xfce might need.

I found that it is better to download whatever packages you need from within ZipSlck rather than from within Windows, because otherwise there can be problems with the long file names of packages downloaded from within Win98 when you try to access them in ZipSlack.

Hope a lighter file manager helps with the overheating. You might try just installing X first, to see whether it alone produces the heat problem. If so, maybe there is a problem with the graphics card or chip.

I never used zip slack-would I be doubling up on the GUI part of the pc if I have the Win GUI and xfce or does zip slack make your Linux session separate from your Win session?

The two are separate. You choose to boot either Win98 or ZipSlack when starting the computer.

For ZipSlack, you need to press F8 (I think, it's been a while) during boot and then choose "command prompt only." From that DOS prompt, you then run the file that starts ZipSlack in the DOS environment.

More information - everything you need to know to set up ZipSlack - can be found in the instructions and FAQ for ZipSlack at http://www.slackware.com.