Some random thoughts from a Duo fan:
1. A 2300c should be able to run 8.1 well enough, though Dan Palka over on system7today swears by 7.6.1 on these machines.
2. For various reasons, I have 8.6 running on my 2300c (with 56MB RAM) from a CF drive, and though the latter is a relatively slow drive as drives go, performance is acceptable. In your position, I would think of running 7.6.1 with your RAM, but before going to that bother, you might want to run a disk utility to see if it improves matters, because you may need a new drive. You MIGHT even have a scsi drive in the 2300c, as it had a scsi bus as well as IDE. Any scsi PowerBook drive or early 2.5" IDE drive will be slow. The stock (IDE) drives in the 5300 and the 2300c were in fact notoriously slow, so even a small 2-3GB drive should speed things up noticeably.
3. You are not going to be able to connect to a share over IP from the localtalk port, but you can from the Dock (assuming you have ethernet). Open Transport is included in 8 and available for 7.x from Apple's older software downloads pages, but you will require ethernet to use AppleTalk over IP. It follows that, if you have nubus ethernet, you may need a specific driver for the card.
4. Your SuperMac Spectrum card sounds like it might be toast, but there may be power supply issues underlying the behaviour, so check the card in another nubus machine. The capacitors in the Dock PS have a known propensity to fail.
1. A 2300c should be able to run 8.1 well enough, though Dan Palka over on system7today swears by 7.6.1 on these machines.
2. For various reasons, I have 8.6 running on my 2300c (with 56MB RAM) from a CF drive, and though the latter is a relatively slow drive as drives go, performance is acceptable. In your position, I would think of running 7.6.1 with your RAM, but before going to that bother, you might want to run a disk utility to see if it improves matters, because you may need a new drive. You MIGHT even have a scsi drive in the 2300c, as it had a scsi bus as well as IDE. Any scsi PowerBook drive or early 2.5" IDE drive will be slow. The stock (IDE) drives in the 5300 and the 2300c were in fact notoriously slow, so even a small 2-3GB drive should speed things up noticeably.
3. You are not going to be able to connect to a share over IP from the localtalk port, but you can from the Dock (assuming you have ethernet). Open Transport is included in 8 and available for 7.x from Apple's older software downloads pages, but you will require ethernet to use AppleTalk over IP. It follows that, if you have nubus ethernet, you may need a specific driver for the card.
4. Your SuperMac Spectrum card sounds like it might be toast, but there may be power supply issues underlying the behaviour, so check the card in another nubus machine. The capacitors in the Dock PS have a known propensity to fail.