2GB should definitely be enough for most of them, does the disc drive spin when you boot the machine? Many computers check the disk drive before booting from the HDD.
Well... I looked and it's 1 gig instead of 2.. (2 512 sticks - i thought it had more than that..)
does the disc drive spin when you boot the machine?
Yes. Boot order is floppy, cd, then hard drive. It actually starts to load and just seizes up. I'd need to look at it again to see at what point, but I get screen display that it's loading Linux and tells me it's Mint 16. Then it gets to a point where nothing happens and I'm stuck looking at a really funky looking screen display.. Your thought that it's running out of headroom sounds plausible. I guess I'll need to do some research here, first to find if 1G is enough for Mint 16 32bit...