mac upgrade questions

[preacherman]

Ok I have some mac upgrade questions. A few months ago right before my africa trip I picked up a used mac powerbook g4 on craigslist for cheap. My thinking was it would be a great computer to take on my trip (it was) and that I could always sell it again when I got back. So now I am back and I was going to sell it but I had a thought. We have been thinking about upgrading our home computer (a dell laptop) that is very outdated. After using the mac my wife and I both like it better (we do a lot of photo stuff) so we are wondering about just upgrading it.

Is upgrading my macbook a good idea? Here is the specs on it
Mac G4 ti
mac os 10.4.11
30 gig hd
667 mhz
1gb sdram
dvd, airport, 15 1/2 screen

I have looked online and it appears you can get everything needed. I have seen several hard drives, good deals on the newest OS, and even deals on new processors. I have upgraded hard drives and memory before but never a processor and never on a mac.

So my questions are: Is this even worth it? Is spending a few hundred $$ to upgrade my mac worth the trouble? If so what would be the smartest upgrades?? A faster processor? New OS? Both??

My last mac was in college in the early 90's so I am a bit behind on the macs. Thanks for the help.

 

[preacherman]

yea I have been looking around more today and getting a new one. may be the best bet

 

[chrismc]

Sadly, its not worth the upgrade. Save your money for a new MacBook. Apple has effectively made all the older PowerPC Macs (G3, G4, G5) obsolete. The next version of Mac OS (10.6, "Snow Leopard"), due out this winter, will be released for the Intel chips only. Application support will likely follow. While applications are now built as "Universal Binaries", meaning they can run on any type of processor, the performance of the Intel procs is so significantly faster that many of the applications currently being sold (and those that will be out in the next year or so) will only useably run on those chips. The older Mac notebooks are also limited in the amount of memory that you can put in them. You really should be looking for at least 2GB memory these days, with plans to upgrade to 4GB in the not-too-distant future (or already if you're a power user).

I currently have a G4 iBook and a dual G5 Power Mac. I'm feeling the pain as well, and it depresses me that these beloved computers that have served me so well need to be replaced.