Slimming down or topping up???

[rockashacka]

Right on peeps,

This is the dilemma I'm facing...

My main box is a P3 733 with 320MB ram with a dual booth Win98/Gutsy and a
3 way split 80gb HD. I'm positive I forgot something important, feel
free to ask in case.

Recently I've experienced slower performances while working on Gutsy - I
really keep W98 because of Adobe Illustrator and maybe another couple of
programs - and the filesystem takes about 11gb out of 12 on its partition.
Knowing that I got a hefty 3.5gb of mail (need to go through them, I know,
I know) where do I start trimming the unnecessary fat?

Alternatively I'd upgrade to 8.10 or 8.4 but the issues are:
- would it clog up my machine?
- were are the datas that need to be backed up, supposing that an OS
upgrade wipes the content of a previous OS?

I've tried to use Xfce or whatever is called as a desktop manager and I saw
a performance improvement but after I messed things up - possibly
uninstalling the wrong pkg - once I log in xfce session, I only get a blue
screen with the pointer. Something to do with xorg or summat like dat...

Hope some soul will give a hand,

Marco

[Pro-reason]

The main data to back up is your personal preferences. They are located in /home/. Then, there's the currently installed applications, but you can just get them from Synaptic again.