[geeks] Princeton Univ. Surplus haul today...

[Lionel Peterson]

Hi all,

Looking for some Mag G4 pointers - today I picked up what I have come to find out is a G4 'Sawtooth' Mac (see: http://lowendmac.com/ppc/g4saw.shtml ), with a 20 Gig HD, AGP (ATI Rage 128+ graphics) and 768 Meg of RAM, along with an installed OS/X 10.3.9 O/S. I have a few questions:

I threw a NOS (New Old Stock) 100 Gig IDE HD drive in as the primary, I am really limited to 128 Gig or less with the system as-is, no matter what O/S I install, correct?

OS/X 10.4 gives me the option to do a mirror (RAID 1) or striped (RAID 0) filesystem, if I put another 100 Meg IDE HD on the same on-board controller will I get a performance improvement with RAID 1, or is the on-board controller "bad"?

What is a good *cost effective* graphics card upgrade - this is an AGP system (2x!), and I am ignorant about video cards in general, esp. on Macs - is there a low-cost card that will have a profound impact on the performance od Tiger (OS/X 10.4)?

The machine currently has an IDE DVD-ROM drive, any reason I can't just pop in a new DVD-R/W drive and burn DVDs under OS/X 10.4?

The machine currently has 1.25 Gig of RAM in it (I had a spare 512 Meg PC133 DIMM to throw in ;^) - 1.5 Gig is the Max RAM, correct?

Also, there is a bunch of software on the old 20 Gig HD (MS Office, etc.) any ideas on how to transfer it to the new 100 Gig HD? I asume I COULD run it off the 20 Gig HD if I made it a spare drive, correct?

Finally, how do you "properly" close the side - I can't seem to really "lock in" the MB tray/side panel - I figure I'm missing something...

All in all, it is a pretty capable machine - looks to have been decomissioned last December (that's when the last update was installed), and for $43 for a fairly clean (minor scratches on the plastic, but all plastic intact) I'm quite happy.