[G4] Gifted with a G4/500

[Christina Samuels]

Hi all! My mom was cleaning out the basement and let me take her
pretty-close-to-stock G4/500 (it has a stick of 64 megs of RAM in it in
addition to the stock 256, but that's all the changes that I can see.)

I know this is far from the latest and greatest (I have a Macbook Core 2 Duo
now) but I think the upgradeability of it is pretty cool. I just want to
play around with it, recognizing that it can't do everything newer machines
can do, and it's not as fast. So I don't want to spend a Mac Mini-sized
amount of money on it. I'd be using it for iTunes, NeoOffice,
surfing...light stuff. Not iMovie or processor-intensive design work; I
assume it's not well suited for that in its stock configuration.

So my thoughts are:

1. See if it still works (it turns on, I hear the disk spinning, but I
didn't hear the Mac "bong")

2. Get a monitor (this was already in my plans, because I wanted one for
when I need to work for a long time on my Macbook. Can the video card in
this computer work with today's monitors?)

3. Get more RAM

4. Install Tiger

5. Hard drive? Superdrive? Processor upgrade? I've read that a processor
upgrade is not a good investment because these machines are still so behind
the Intel Macs. A super drive is not that expensive, so, maybe? I already
have an external firewire drive that I use for Time Machine backups, so I
don't know about getting a hard drive. But I know they're also pretty cheap,
so, maybe?

I don't need wireless because I have an Airport Extreme Base Station and
(I'm assuming) I can just connect it by Ethernet.

Is there anything I'm not thinking of? Any other suggestions you experts
might have? Thanks very much in advance for any advice you may be able to
lend!

Christina
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