Some distros (I don't know about ArchLinux, but it's the case for Mandriva) force anti-aliased fonts over the standard, X core fonts (Adobe Helvetica, Times, Courrier...). Alas, those fonts ("Liberation" fonts and/or URW fonts) are far from good. You may restore support for (proportional but not anti-aliased) X core fonts by removing the corresponding overriding configuration file in /etc/fonts/
In Mandriva, I removed /etc/fonts/conf/30-mdv-urwfonts.conf and /etc/fonts/conf/30-urw-aliases.conf, which allows me to use again the Adobe Helvetica font (which looks extra sharp and is very readable: see the screen shot below). Beware: you might also need to switch to a non-UTF8 locale (using ISO-8859-15 here), which by the way will also speed up things significantly (UTF-8 sucks as it involves complicate library functions to count the actual number of characters in a string, to split a string, to search occurrences of a string in another, etc...).
There is also the problem of the freetype library which got a non-open licensed high quality renderer that many distro chose not to compile in to keep it 100% Open Source license. You can recompile freetype (libfreetype6) so that this option is enabled on your system, thus providing much better anti-aliased fonts rendering. For Mandriva, it's just a matter of installing the
PLF package of freetype over the Mandriva one.
I have 4Gb here, and more (up to 64Gb) is possible with 32 bits kernels... Just make sure the kernel is compiled with the HIGHMEM64G option enabled.