I've got an old B&W G3 w/ 384 Mb RAM, 400 Mhz, 13 Gb HDD, CD-RW and OS X.4 working on it that I had hoped to make useable for the kids online...my problem is that it's a little sluggish on their game sites (animated kid sites age 6-12 not mega gamer sites).
What would be my best bet for improved performance...max out RAM or look at larger HDD or Processor. I don't want to put much money in it when I can get a G4 on ebay for about $200 or so.
Thanks for taking time to input your opinions!
There really isn't any cheap magic bullet that's going to give you decent Flash performance on a B&W. (And by "decent" I mean "light gaming and video playing", not anything special.) Even if you go the full trifecta of a CPU upgrade ($100-$200), a Radeon or other faster video card (another $50-$100, and getting hard to find.) and more RAM it's still just going to be slow compared to a newer desktop Mac you could get for similar money.
I really wouldn't recommend looking at anything with a CPU under 1Ghz. Unfortunately Flash just doesn't do well with anything less. Sad but true. (Parts of PBS Kids' site were a little sluggish on my old 1.33Ghz Powerbook G4. Sort of sad when you consider the sort of dreck machines you're likely to find in elementary school labs.)
--Peace
Seems like flash isn't that hot on older slow macs, probably better off with an older freecycle PC.
More RAM would help out of OSX is swapping to the HD too much, but it is not worth putting much money into it when faster machines are getting cheaper.
Tell the kids to find a new games site.
(joke!)
Seriously though, more RAM ought to help, and it's so cheap anyway. Also, the hard drive is probably old and slow. I got an 80GB hard drive for my G3 for $50 a year ago.
I've still got a B&W setup for my daughter (although she prefers the XP AMD64 PC I've got setup for her on the other end of the KVM switch). The B&W's got a 500mhz G4 ZIF, 1GB RAM (CL2), and a 7200rpm HD with OS 10.4.11 installed. Which game sites are you referring to? I can have her try them and see how they play. I'm assuming you're on cable or DSL.
I would second the idea to just get a cheap PC. Flash on my Macs has always seemed very 'meh' even compared to slower PCs.