Up-to-date Linux distro with KDE which will run well on old system?

I had a 300MHz (PII) computer once ran KDE (SuSE Linux 7) very well. That computer broke down about a year ago, so a few months after that I bought a 350Mhz (PII) computer to be my new little Linuxbox.

I installed RedHat 8 on it, and unfortunately KDE ran very slowly on it (opening / closing windows / applications took numerous seconds).

The KDE version of RedHat 8 was a lot flashier than the KDE version of SuSE 7. I guess that was the main reason why KDE ran so slowly on the new computer. I think I had the amount RAM in my old computer souped up a bit (200MB+), while I only have 64MB RAM in my new one.

It's a ugly, heavy, bulky Dell - think can I actually upgrade its RAM? I had real problems building in network cards and a new harddisk because Dell builds their systems in such an unstandard way (I had to bend the metal bit of my network cards to fit them in because the slot interface inside was totally locked up).

Anyway, my question is, are there any Linux distros which are beginner friendy and run well on older systems? One which will easily let me tune down the flashyness of KDE so that I won't have to rely only on text-mode?

Or should any new version of KDE let me tune it down so that it runs well? The only graphic options one I found which one could tune down didn't really seem to make a performance difference (nor did they make a very big graphical difference either).

The reason why I don't really want to install SuSE 7 is because all the core files (the kernel etc.) would be out of date, and updating those is something I probably couldn't manage.

You're not going to find an OS that is both user-friendly and uses low system resources. Those that are user-friendly usually rely on a lot of graphical elements which in turn use more system resources. You need to choose which is more important to you- speed or user-friendly?

64 meg of RAM isn't enough. Up it, even to just 128 meg, and you'll see a big difference.

You could also ditch KDE and use IceWM, which is very windows-like, or WindowMaker (my favorite), both of which are much lighter weight than KDE or Gnome. You can still run Gnome or KDE apps under other window managers, as well.

I run RH 7.3 on few PII-233s with 128meg of RAM or more, and they are very usable in WindowMaker. These machines are mostly lightweight servers/routers, so I rarely use X on them.

64 should be more than enough for command line but not for GUI

If you actually READ the question, you'd see that they want to be able to use a gui, which is why my reply was targetted as it was.

Next time, read the post thoroughly before going off half-cocked and creating another useless post.

64MB is just enough depending on the WM like Hero said. There must be a way to install Kde with a minimum of bloat (even if kde/gnome are a synonym for bloat). Just tweak that little baby.

Use appropriate apps such as Phoenix or Galeon (which I believe is even more lightweight). Gentoo will probably help too (build everything from source) if you have a faster spare computer or don't mind spending a few hours (took 2 days on my p166 w/ 32mb of ram).

I heard Knoppix is very user friendly but my cpu overheats and crash all the time.