(edited 2005.0420)

--Speed and security, plus virtually complete control over the box.

--My suggestion is to go out and buy a cheap 2nd computer (500MHz Pentium or better, 200+ MB RAM and 10+Gig HD) and set it up as a Squid server. You should also buy an inexpensive Ethernet switch (NOT a hub!) and connect everything thru 100MBit wired Ethernet. This is what I did with SuSE 7.3 back in the day (sharing dialup!), and ported it over to Knoppix Hdinstalled (6+ computers + Xbox sharing 4 Mbit cable.)

--This way you don't have to do *any* major work (outside of changing some settings and redirecting the network hookup) to your "main" box, and will have a dedicated machine to experiment with Linux.

Reasons why:
o Multiple computers can share the Squid connection (example: set all browser proxy settings to
10.0.0.9:3128, if that's the IP of the Squidserver) and all Web accesses will be logged and cached.

o You can use a Linux firewall (I recommend "firestarter" for others, but personally I use a custom Iptables script) to protect the Squid box

o Anyone who wants to gank your Windoze box needs to get thru the Linux proxy + firewall 1st (I've never been hacked yet!)

o By having all Internet requests go thru the proxy, it's *much* harder for viruses, etc to get control of your Windoze box (you can even run XP w/o a firewall, since only the proxy will be directly connected.) However, you will need to setup the XP box to have a static IP address, as well as the server.

o By having everything go thru the switch, you only need (1) Ethernet card for each box, including the server.

--I'd be glad to help you with this, if you'd like. Send me a PM and I'll email you my Squid config file.

--Remember: Good passwords + Backups are your friend!

o References:

(Squid)
http://www.squid-cache.org/

( Cheap switch )
http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&oi=fr...zuQAAAAAAAAAAA

--Note - The things I use my Linux boxen for (in addition to Squid):

o Backup storage

o FTP + NFS server(s)

o VMware host (win98se client)

o DVD / CD burning

o Playing movies / dvd's

o Web browsing (I use Opera and Firefox)

o Time synch (' ntpdate ' to update 1 box, then ' rdate ' to update the others)

o Playing with / setting up LVM (logical volume management) and SCSI stuff

--I don't really use them for playing games much anymore (outside of gataxx, frozen bubble and kpoker) - I have an Xbox for that. On a daily basis, I rarely use W98 anymore, even though I have Halo for the PC. Most of my stuff gets done in Linux now.