[G4] G4 Quicksilver 2002 Dual 1GHz Upgrade Advice

[John Smutko]

Tough call, you're looking at $600-$700 for an upgrade to Dual 1.8 GHz  
processors at OWC right now, which is darn close to what you'd spend  
on a brand new Intel Mini, which won't give you as much memory or  
onboard storage but will crush even the upgraded Quicksilver on things  
like Video editing.  On the other hand, playing around inside the guts  
of the old G4 towers is fun, darn it.

Big question you need to ask yourself is what do you use it for on a  
daily basis?

I upgraded my beloved Sawtooth 400MHz a while ago to max out memory,  
upgraded the processor to a single 1.8GHz and put in an ATI Radeon  
9800 Pro.  It's still serviceable, runs Leopard fine.  The Sawtooth is  
what I'm typing on right now and it's still my main desktop machine  
but the writing is pretty clearly on the wall that it's eventually  
headed for fileserver duty, so I threw an SATA PCI card in there and  
also a couple of 1 TB SATA drives, as well as a Firewire 800 card so I  
can connect fast external storage as necessary.  I store family video  
on it as well as TV programs I lift off my Motorola DVR, but any  
manipulation of those files I do on my wife's Intel Macbook.

-John