Oh brother. This thread is tickling a pet peeve of mine.
So ... I still use a pair of G4 Macs:
-- My laptop: 12" Powerbook G4, first generation (with 867 MHz and max'd out at 640MB RAM, 10.4, soon to be 10.5)
-- My personal desktop machine: last-generation G4 Mac Mini (1.5GHz with a full 1GB of RAM, 10.5)
Both of these computers -- even the laptop that is going on five years old -- are perfectly fine for general use. (General use = applications like MS office, web surfing, youtube videos, etc.) I even use the laptop for high-end scientific work, in particular data analysis on large data sets, and I rarely have problems. The only truly insurmountable obstacles I encounter are when I need to address more than 4GB of memory at a time (which is what my 64-bit office desktop machine is for) and when I need to run a job that is truly runtime critical (which is what the 400-node cluster and enormous shared-memory box are for).
Sure ... complicated web pages might take an extra second to resolve. Files might take an extra second or three to load. The pivot table on your big Excel spreadsheet might take an extra five seconds to calculate, and that enormous HD video may play at only 15fps ... but to critically judge an older computer's performance when you seriously don't need high-end performance anyway ... therein lies the road to madness.
Of course, some home-consumer applications truly benefit from a modern computer. The most obvious is games. Active work with image/video processing is another. And when you get into business computing, where time is truly money, the upgrades usually pay for themselves. But I have to say, these older computers are usually much more capable than what they're given credit for.
So I encourage you to give that G4 Mac Mini a try. Fill it up with memory and you'll likely be pleasantly surprised.
As a related aside, when people complain about (modern or old) computers being slow for general purpose use, it is usually because they are under-endowed with memory. Certainly, there are many variables that affect a computer's apparent performance, including the speed of the memory, the speed of the hard disk, bus speeds, etc., even network speed, but for the majority of cases, the amount of memory is the culprit. (Or more specifically, using fancy-pants comp-sci lingo, having a deficit of core memory is the primary cause of vertical waste.) As such, I highly recommend that any time you get a computer (and this is increasingly important with old computers), you fill it up with as much RAM as it can handle.
Rant over ... thanks for listening.
