jonypawks

Hmm, since you're on a slower machine you'd definitely want a minimalistic's WM. I would suggest Blackbox but you said you didn't like it too much. Fluxbox is similar in resource usage but has a bit more eyecandy. Openbox is another one that's pretty lightweight and it uses XML for it configuration. That's what I use. I've been hearing good things about XFCE4, but it wasn't for me. FVWM can be very lightweight and is probably the most customizable WM out there but you have to be willing to dedicate a large chunk of time to configuring it. Well, hope one of those suits what you need.

I said Knoppix, but I really think you should take out the individual distros. There's a huge difference between using Red Hat or Fedora and using something like Gentoo, which is what I use.

I would say if they made one, I'd give it a shot. But I wouldn't buy it, because they'd probably give it out for free, and maybe open source. Although I don't think it's needed at all. If you play games, then use Windows, if you don't use Linux, they make it easier all the time.

There's something like DesktopX called Samurize that's a little less resource heavy, you should give that a shot. It can be confusing to set up though.

I use Openbox as my WM.Firefox/Thunderbird of course.I like Xine more than mplayer, always had better luck with it.And I use X.org instead of XFree, just a fork off of it.Beep-media-player instead of XMMS, uses GTK2.But this is all just my opinion.

Okay, I think by what I've read, you want a linux box here. You will be able to access files with an SFTP client such as WinSCP or something. You should probably run an SFTP server rather than a FTP server, because the connection is encrypted that way and thus much more secure. You would be able to login with a ssh client such as putty and run applications. That would only get you a terminal but you could setup vnc, which is very easy to do, and get a graphical interface that acts similarly to remote desktop. And since linux is a multi-user OS, multiple people could do this at once, which cannot be achieved with a non-server edition of windows. As for distributions, I would recomment Gentoo Linux but it can be overwhelming if you're not familiar with linux already. Although they're working on getting a graphical installation together, and if they don't have that available the documentation for it is very good. They also have some forums on their site with a solution to just about every problem you'll encounter. That's what I would do, but if you're not comfortable with linux you might not want gentoo. Gentoo is nice, package management is retarded easy with it and it's very up-to-date but you have to know what you're doing. It's also very good for a low-end system or if you want the OS to be very light. Slackware can also be a lightweight distro if you set it up right, this is what I've heard, I've never really liked slack so I wouldn't knowYou could also setup a Samba server like the guy before me said, make it a little easier on the client side to browse files.