That's why you still have to get allowance. $5 a week adds up if you let it. (I know, 2 months to get $40...)

I've found my parents are always receptive to "I want /item/ that costs $100. I've saved up $70, can you provide the rest?" (The figures are relative, of course.)

If you get your nose into enough places, you'll pick up free hardware. Heck, you can even pick up 200mhz-300mhz boxes for cheap at thrift stores. I wouldn't pay more than $40 for it, though.

I dont get allowance but next summer i will be 16 so finding a job will be easy.

Try Damn Small Linux, you can boot it from cd and try it out, if you really like it there is a hard drive install that is pretty well automated. I had this SCREAMING on a PI 200mmx with 64 RAM and a 1Gig HD in graphical mode with Open Office and Firefox!

Although one thing that I would like to mention is that even though linux *can* run on a 486 with 8 meg of ram, like windows you will be limited to the functionality of the software based on the hardware, ie. chances are you won't get a GUI, and if you do, it will be the old style X system, it won't be as advanced KDE or Gnome. chances are the video card is less than 1MB, if it is of the same era as the rest of the machine, it has a 256k or 512k video card. again, I picked up a 500Mhz Dell at a thrift store for $20, I would look around.

sorry i should have responded early the machine's cd drive is busted and too old to read burnt cds so all i could run on it was basic linux (a distro that runs off of 2 floppy diskettes)

You could use a boot floppy and do an ftp install with a distro too.

how would you do that. it sounds like and interesting solution

Actually, there should be two ways to do this depending on your distro:

1. I've installed clarkconnect Linux (recently) via ftp. When I boot up off the CD, it asks if I'm going to do a CD install or an ftp. If it is ftp, it enables eth0 (outside line) to download the packages and install. I'm not sure how many distros out there offer this but I know that it was a standard option in redhat 7.2 and previous with the anaconda installer. You just have to shop around. I can tell you of the distro's I've installed in the last few weeks only one of them had the ftp option. Perhaps its becoming antiquated? Not sure on that one; other users might be able to provide feedback.

2. For computers that don't boot off the CD: I had an old machine that I was able to use a sbootmgr.dsk image from slackware to 'force boot' off of a non-bootable CDROM. So, I had the slackware CDROM "boot" even though my BIOS and CDROM didn't support it. That makes for a tidy way of doing things as well.

thanks.
I think the option of installing via ftp is becoming obselete probably because it could take a long time depending on the user's connection, and the users computer must be able to connect to the internet so they would probably need to be on a network that is set up on another computer.