[G4] Upgrading a Quicksilver 2002 933

[Andrea Studebaker]

I've always received excellent advice from this list and I hope you can help me again.  I've been getting conflicting advice from people I trust.

I have a Quicksilver 2002 933 with 1.5 gb RAM, two HDs, a newish 120 and a brand new 500, a USB 2.0 card I added, the original video card and a second card I installed to run a second monitor (which is now dying.)  I have a partition on the 120 running 10.4.11 and a partition on the 500 running 10.5.6.  

I just want to get to where this thing will run smoothly in Leopard for a couple more years until I can buy a newer (but not new) Mac Pro.  I have a lot of problems with web-based games using Java (this is just casual gaming at Pogo, no WOW or anything like that), more so in Leopard than Tiger, and some random kernel panics and freezes in both systems.  Also, when running in 10.5.6, the machine seems to cycle in and out of sleep mode every few minutes when idle.

I do a lot of web work, as I'm going to school online and also an admin of an active message board.  Other than that, I do a little basic office work, a good bit of PhotoShop, and I'm starting to learn Illustrator.

I've had some people tell me that upgrading to a dual 1ghz cpu, which I can get on eBay for about $120-$130 is the way to go.  Others have said it won't make much difference.  Some have suggested going for an upgrade to a 1.6 or 1.8 at OWC, but that is quite a lot more money for this starving artist's budget ($250 - $400). I've also had suggestions that I get a new video card, which I think sounds like a good move, but there is only one choice at OWC and it's $280 bucks.  Others say not much can be done.

What suggestions would you have to get more reliable use from this computer?  I don't think I need blazing fast speed, but I need more stability.

Thanks in advance.  If you need more info from me, I'll try to send it back lickety-split.

Andrea






      
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://listserver.themacintoshguy.com/pipermail/g4/attachments/20090428/215399c2/attachment.html