I run a tiny ubuntu server in my home network which basically does it all for me- Squid/Apache/Asterisk/FTP and offcourse as my NAS device through SAMBA. I restored two 10 year old Dell to make a single usable machine with 400MHz P3 processor and 128X3 SDRAM. The machine is slow by any means unless you want to comaper to a 486, but it does the work and it does the work really well for me. That P3 chip sips very little power being a 24W rated processor. I don't think the whole machine does not sip more than 50W daily, but I may be wrong.
Anyway, the point is, while I do most of admin stuff thru ssh, once in a while I really like to get into my servers X-server. From Windows machines, the only free option that really worked for me is Xming. However, Gnome works really slowly even under really stripped down form. What I found that Xfce4 works like a charm. All I have to do is invoke xfce4-session from Xming starting dialogue.
