I recently put together a system for a friend out of spare parts and need some advice on what OS she should use...

It's a P4 1.3 with 128MB RDRAM, Geforce 4 440MX, Ancient 8GB Maxtor HDD (Will be used as a swap file drive when she gets a 7200rpm drive in a month or so).

Win 98SE is notorious for its BSOD's and I don't think that XP would run well with that little ram...

Is Win 2K a good idea?

W2k seems like a good compromise, 98SE is just getting a little dated.
Another ok alternative would be to use WinXP with all it's crappy themes turned off, that'll make it almost the same speed as W2k but with a few more features.

Really the best advice would be to grab another 128mb or more ASAP. because it seems a shame having a relativley fast system being dragged down by limited ram.

Pity it's RDRAM though, that stuff is way to expensive, you could of gone to 512+ in SDR/DDR for less.

RDRAM has significantly come down in price -- 256MB of PC2100 is about $65, and 256MB RDRAM about $75. 512MB makes it about $135 and $150, respectively.

Do consider Win ME.

Win98SE is still the best compatible OS out there. If you use a program called Cacheman and limit the diskcache and enable 'Conservative SwapFileUsage=1' your system isn't going to swap at all (only with heavy 3D-games). Yes, mark my words this is the best way to speed-up your system.
I meself got 256M RAM and even when playing SOF2 or NFS Hot Pursuit 2 my system doen't swap trough these simple settings most people don't even know!!

since u copy the tweak guide somewhere, how come not one will know than yourself?! lol

I presume that gaming is more or less out of the question with Win 2K though...

RAM is on its way 2-128 MB chips, which will bring it up to 384...

So I guess I'll just wait and put XP on after I get the ram for her...

If you dont want to end up offering tech support for this woman forever, then dont do win9x. The new software available for it will start to dwindle now. Win2k is clearly more stable but I dont think its as user friendly as XP. From this standpoint, XP is in the lead.

I think 128 should be enough for even the casual user. I have a buddy with 192 and the system runs fine as long as you dont open tons of apps (hey, avg user is NOT a power user like us). So I'd suggest XP for now, you can always change it and a RAM upgrade is just short whiel off anyway..

I'd agree with the last post. It's suprising just what XP will run on. I've even got it on a small proxy server (AMD K6-2 233 with 96MB!) and it works fine. :o

Sure, if you wanna play games and stuff then get yourself a memory upgrade but I'd recommend XP over any other MS OS.