...What?
2 things; Windows XP+ should NOT be run on less than 512 MB of RAM, and in an ideal Situation, less than 1 GB.
& No GUI? Yeah, cause we all want to go back to the days when you had to type out everything.
Go get yourself a copy of DOS and forget about this "Windows" thing.
Is GUI the pretty stuff..? ya know what we see...? not all the text..... code? Then yea, just get more or allocatte more ram on hdd for OS. GUI...? Is this 8086 days...? Come on...... even I as a dummy bricklayer can command the OS to use x of my 2 gig physical ram and use y of pagefile (hdd) ram and be smart enuf to allocate it in the first place. That's a given. This MS 7 does suck a bunch of ram, but I bet 7/8 of it can be "told" by be to use pagefile. If I care to. No biggie. As I did with, 3.1, '95, '98, XPpro. Just gotta figure and take time to do so. I think MS just makes it possible for real (mass users) dummys to boot and surf. But, bricklayer dummies like me gotta know how to tweak. Linux in any flavor, ....you don't tweak... You just call it crap and give up and settle for MS for the masses. 512, hell..... that's plenty for pretty GUI.
Like use x for physical ram....... push all other y until I DECIDE to delete from HDD, or reboot. X is most recent tasks, y is what I used recently. Any OS will take your command to do that. But, not by default. You must set it up like that. Well, since 3.1 anyways......
I am using XP pro now, testing Windows 7. I like it. I do. I think it is a good, stable system. MS, is nice to let me test it prior to buying or thinking that I 'should' buy it. I will tweak and screw it up, but that's why it is on my machine. I care to have a fast, low maintaince OS, that I can mis-treat, abuse, tear apart, tweak, play with and do 'productive' things with. XPpro, provided that, heck it got faster with no blue screens of death even after a month of no reboots, than LinuxMint, I'll see. But, I am just a dummy bricklayer.