flshope, on the 15 year old machine, try just a window manager. I am partial to fluxbox, although JWM and IceWM are nice and easy.

I may stand corrected, but I think Flashback is just gnome extensions simulating the old look of Gnome2, but it's still Gnome3.

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Thank you, ChuangTzu. I used IceWM a while ago, but it seemed to have problems handling USB disk drives. It's been a while, so it might be worth another look. I'm not familiar with JWM, so I'll check that out. Thanks.

I suspect your are right about Flashback. I think it depends on a lot of Gnome apps and other baggage. When I first did a clean install of Debian 9 on my 15-year-old machine, I chose Gnome for the desktop environment because it worked with Debian 8. But under 9, the machine wouldn't even boot. So I did a second install and selected Xfce, and the machine booted OK. I concluded Gnome had gone beyond my old hardware's capabilities.