I think if stability and gaming are the goals, you should consider reserving whatever it takes to upgrade OSs from Win98SE. It is a fine OS for gaming, but lacks a little in terms of stability in my experience. Windows 2000 or XP would be a better choice, I'm afraid, since Linux really isn't about gaming. XP in particular is supposed to have good gaming support (I'm not a gamer, so don't really know). You can see if you can get XP for a song from this thread:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=40&threadid=1058149&FTVAR_MSGDBTABLE=&STARTPAGE=1
Otherwise, you'll probably pay $100 for it if you want a legal copy. That leaves you with only $100 to play with for a hardware upgrade. If you live near a Fry's I would second gsethi's comment about picking up a K7S5A/XP combo. Sometimes those come down to $65, though I'm not wild about recommending PCChips motherboards (I've built a few systems with the combos and except one board that had sound volume that was too low to be useful, they were OK). Today, for instance, the Bay Area Fry's are offering the ECS board and an OEM XP2200+ for $80, and that's pretty much par for the course. Then you could use your SDRAM & Geforce & maybe upgrade to DDR somewhere down the line when you are feeling more flush.
If you are in those benighted bits of the Vereinigten Staaten without access to arbeit macht Fry's you could order something comparable online for maybe a few drachma more. Consider a board with both DDR and SDRAM slots so you can reuse your PC133 (most of the benchies I've seen indicate that upgrading to DDR only gains you a very marginal advantage in real-world applications, perhaps 5%). Popular choices include the Biostar M7VIG Pro (with built in Savage4 video, so you could power two monitors with your Geforce and extend your desktop if you happen to have a second monitor sitting around) for around $56, the K7S5A for as little as $43, or maybe a dual RAM KT266A board like the Shuttle AK32E for $57 or the Biostar M7VIW for about $48 delivered, e.g.
http://www.bzboyz.com/store/product3966.html
Pair one of these boards with an XP1900+ ($50 & up) or an XP2200+ (Pricewatching at $60 onwards) and I'm sure you'll notice the speed increase, plus all these boards come with USB 2.0 and onboard LAN (and sound).
Edit: The current Bay Area Fry's ad pegs the Athlon XP+1800 retail (with fan) and ECS K7S5A for $60. Goods until next Tuesday.
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