online banking and strategic Ubuntu upgrade opportunities

[John]

MF wrote:

> 
> As a result, we will no longer support online banking on browsers used
> in combination with Windows 98/98SE/Me after June 30th, 2006. We
> recommend that you upgrade your operating systems before June 30, 2006.
> While we will no longer support these platforms, online banking will
> continue to work as it does today."

Bear in mind that those "operating" systems perform at their best ub 64 
Mbytes of RAM: more and they actually slow down.

I'd hesitate to recommend Linux or a standard configuration of any other 
current distro (can we silently ignore those cut-down configs such as 
Ubuntu basic server setups?) on such a machine. I've been contemplating 
what I might put on aged Pentium IIs I might give away. They'd run RHL 
6.2 very well, I imagine: Mrs S used to use a Pentium 133 64 Mbytes and 
was quite happy with it. OTOH machines with 256 seem to struggle these days.

Now, a new cheap box with Linux (I don't care what distro) would be a 
fine thing.