Best OS for my PC

Definately go for XP. As a general rule of thumb, any computer with 256mb ram or more (this is important) and a CPU of 800MHz or greater is a perfect canididate for windows XP. Even a Pentium II 450MHz will run great on windows XP, but I wouldn't really go lower than that.

As for the speed issue, winodws XP is almost always slower booting than winodws 9x. However, program execution should be about the same, meaning that once XP is running, it shouldn't be any slower than 98SE.

I find it's a combo of CPU/RAM/HD for XP. 256MB min. of RAM, but try for 512 if you can. I find that older hard-drives can really hurt in XP, with the Windows File Protection/System File Checker and indexing(i disable it). XP is slower at opening files, and general responsiveness, and throw an old 5400rpm drive in the mix with slow processor,and low RAM....can make you pull out your hair. If you do run XP on the PIII, make sure to disable as many unnecessary services/background tasks as you can...to lighten the load. GL

There is one Windows OS that kills performance @ 1GHz and that is Windows 2000; Almost all the options and compatibility of XP, it also offers reduced resource consumption compared to it.

If you want stability on a low-end system there is only one choice:

Windows 2000 Professional

Has the stability of XP without the waste of resources. Although it might look like the next version of 98 it is not. It is Windows NT 5.0.

I have used XP SP2 on my school's Pentium III 866 machines with 512MB RAM. It does run okay, but it doesn't run nearly as quickly as when those computers used to run W2K Professional. XP is a much slower OS overall than 2000 on lower-end hardware. The lower-end, the faster 2000 is than XP. The biggest slowdown between 2000 and XP is the whole logon sequence. In 2000, it would take maybe 3-5 seconds but it can take as long as 2 minutes on an XP machine with much better hardware as there is much more crap happening behind the scenes (no I do not really care about things like "Internet Explorer Branding Policy," just give me the blasted desktop!)

CP/M-86. Hands down.

I had to make a PIII 1.26GHz, 256MB RAM run on XP SP1 for a friend. I spent the better part of a day twiddling my thumbs. I finally ended up selling the POS for him for $25.

what about linux? a good light weight distro would fly on that box.

I actually ran Win XP on a Pentium 1 w/ 256 megs and WinNT 4.0 on a 468 with 64megs. It seems slow PCs do much better with enough RAM. Just don't plan to run anything more demanding than Office apps or cardgame. Then I was surfing the web with a 386 sx 16, 640k, Win 3.1, Netscape 1.0, and a 2400b modem (my 14.4k broke ). Too slow to surfing, but ran IRC fine.
Usually for anything less than 256 megs and greater than a P-1, I recommend Win98 2nd.

I once ran Windows 3,066 super duper ultimate premium professional edition on my Gameboy, and it to ran fine

Good Linux Box, if not stick with 98se. Why make the change?

Strip off Themes, System Restore and other unnecessary stuff and services from Windows XP SP2 using nLite, and it'll be almost as good as Windows 2000.

Windows 2000 is getting a bit backdated now. To install other newer softwares in Windows 2000, you need to install new stuff like Windows Installer, DirectX 9.0 etc., so it virtually ends up being a nLight'ed version of Windows XP.

I second Windows 2000 or a linux distro if you are conforable with that.

(back in the days, at work)We upgrade some PII 350 Windows98 to win2k. The key is to have 512meg of ram. It takes forever to boot but runs like a charm afterwards!