* Istiqfar
I think X-windows memory requirement is higher than windows GUI. It's understandable, that X have client-server architecture, while windows is not. Of course this make X has drawbacks beside the advantages. So, if you prefer comparing linux and windows, try with sufficient memory for X, ie, 512 mb,
That's not X, that's your Window Manager or Desktop Environment. I can run X (with windowmaker) very comfortably on a toshiba satelite laptop (233Mhz 64M ram, suse 8.X) . On a gateway solo laptop (600Mhz, 192M ram) Suse 9 w/ KDE is snappier then XP (esp. on startup). 128M ram is indeed not enough if you are running a full featured linux box with KDE (though with KDE 3.2 things have improved) , which I guess was your original point.
problems like hangs, dr watson, etc. It's also found in many places where linux box almost never shutdown, or even they don't have monitor at console. Some of my clients shutdown their linux only 1 day in 1 year.
We used to have our secondary DNS server run on a Pentium box with a 133Mhz CPU , 540M harddrive and 16M memory (suse 7.3 based) without problems. The only reason we upgraded that box was that the harddrive was starting to amke weird noises, and we had another spare box that was easier to reinstall everything ont he new one than to bother finding a replacement drive for the old one.