Notes . . .
Win9x has a few great /switches to make life easier, but lets be honest, life would be easier if that computer was thrown away and you use WinXP
WinXP on the other hand, is a great OS. With the right amount of tweaks (and Service Pack 2), I believe you can get the speed / responsiveness of using 1GB of memory, while you have only 512MB Memory. Then again, the best tweak is more RAM.