[G4] upgrading to 10.4 and possible faulty nic

[Erin Anon]

I have a PowerMac G4 (AGP Graphics) with 400MHz processor and 1gb of ram and
I'm having two issues.

First is an upgrade issue:
It currently has 10.3.9 on it, and I've gotten two different upgrade dvd's
from two different people for 10.4 but I keep having the same problem.
I put the dvd in the dvd drive, and it just spits it right back out after
thinking about it for about 5 seconds.  The cd/dvd icon never shows up on
the desktop.
I've tried rebooting and holding c but that just does the same thing.
One of the dvd's was dvd-r but the other was dvd+r.
I'm thinking the drive is probably fine since it plays normal dvd movies and
can run an ubuntu livecd just fine as well.
Also, my mac doesn't have firewire which it mentions on the apple site is a
requirement, but would that matter?
Any ideas?

Second:
I'm looking for a second opinion on a possible faulty ethernet nic.
Has anyone heard of the ethernet nic being faulty for only getting about 1/3
of the speed available?  I know the problem is localized to my computer
since my roommate's computer (when hooked up via ethernet to router) gets
close to full speed.
I used ubuntu as a live cd and ran the same speedtests and it got the same
speeds, so I'm fairly certain its not a driver issue.
Could this be some type of setting thats incorrect on my computer, or is it
really the hardware like I suspect?
Also, is it worth getting a new ethernet nic for it, or would you recommend
that I just buy a wireless card for it?

Oh, and does anyone have any ideas and opinions on airport original wireless
cards (my mac is compatible with those) versus pci wireless cards?  I'm
leaning towards pci wireless since the airport original would only be
wireless b and ew, wireless b is gross.

Thanks a bunch in advance for any advice!!
-Erin
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