Hello Alan!

  AP> no, very surpisingly it runs with little or no
    > swapping ( I use fvwm2 as my window manager).

That's excellent news!  I've seen 3/50s going for a song,
but the lack of memory was a little offputting.  If it will
run X without thrashing, it'll presumably run light loads
without X okay.  I almost bid on a 3/80 the other day, but
someone else bid about US$10 so hopefully it's gone to a
good home :-)

  AP> I ran X on a 386 with 4M recently, and it thrashed...

That's interesting.  I guess it could be because a 4Mb PC
only has 3Mb of contiguous RAM (and 384Kb probably set aside
for shadowing, or just disabled).  I wonder if it's fair to
say that the 386 is just plain less efficient.  Out of
interest, was it a 386 DX or SX?

  AP> I could of course build a 386/486 box, but where is
    > the fun in that ! :-)

Speaking as someone who's building one at the moment (for
NetBSD/i386) ...I haven't found it yet ;-)

Regards,
  - Andy.