+1 for Crucial memory for a Dell. Older Dell's are finicky and have a history of memory compatibility with many non-Dell brands and will not work. I worked the Dell forums for 10+ years and we always recommended Crucial memory for non-Dell branded memory as it is guaranteed to work in Dell's.
There are other brands that may work - its hit or miss. The exception is the Kingston Value RAM (KVR), it was almost always one that would not work.
One more note
You'd also want to change your bios settings from IDE to what ever else is offered.
I agree that you may be surprised that W7 may run adequately on this machine. And as for Linux a very slim distribution and newbie friendly version is Peppermint that you can run from the CD to see if you want to run as a dual boot on your current machine. Peppermint has a lot you can use right off the bat, I put it on my wife's net book and she is not computer OS savvy and she's using it great.
John
There's not substitute for win-7
Unless no ram upgrade is available then yea I'd 2nd a look at Linux lite
win7 32-bit should run well on pc with 2G ram, if you don't throw too much task at it.
what's wrong with xp on it? xp is more efficient with limited RAM.
Linux is a choice too, only if you have time and patience to spare. you probably would find yourself constantly tweaking and fixing issues than using your pc.
Some of you are saying that it will run nicely with 2 GB of RAM. That means nothing. The CPU is what matters. == In answer to the OP question. I have an old Pentium 4 that came with XP. I put Win 7 on it and it is SLOW. Just about too slow to use. Don't bother to try Win 7 on a Pentium. You won't be happy.
Another option for an older computer is Mint Xfce. Lighter even than Mate. And it reminds me of XP. If not, there are even lighter Linuxes out there.
Why go with Windows(no hate intended)?
There are many other solutions, for example Linux which seems to need like one tenth of what Windows consumes.
I heard some guys on this forum talk wildly about Zorin OS which seems to resemble Windows 7 a lot, you could give it a shot!
Zorin is nice. I made a Zorin demo once. unfortunately the sound is very low. That was a problem on my end. But maybe you can make it halfway work.
Having fun with Zorin
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