So I bought a shiny, new, top-of-the-range iMac off Ebay for the princely sum of £6.99. Well, I say new and top-of-the-range; it's a 233MHz G3, so I could be stretching the definition a little. It has 128MB of RAM, and a mighty 6.4GB hard disk. I came with OS 9, but that's long gone. The question is, what am I going to do with it? If I don't make it useful, the wife will throw it out, and I can't let that happen!

So, I have two things to do; upgrade the paltry amount of RAM in the thing, and choose an operating system. I installed Xubuntu Dapper and it seemed OK, but when I installed the updates it refused to boot any more. Not good. OS X 10.2 seemed to go on alright, but is a bit limited. It could do with a copy of 10.3, but finding that is proving not easy at all.

So, once I choose my software, which is looking likely to be OS X 10.3, I need to get the beasty connected to the network. I have a USB ZD1211 based WiFi adapter that both OS X and Linux can see, but cannot get working. There are drivers for OS X 10.3 and higher, so hopefully upgrading to that should sort all my wireless woes.

Installing a DVD drive could be interesting. The drive is a tray loading laptop drive, although the connector on the back is like none I've ever seen. It's possible that a Dell or Toshiba drive might fit, but to be honest it's a long shot. It might be worth whipping the drive out and taking it down to the Red Rat computer fair at Don Valley to see if a suitable replacement can be found.

Update the iMac, she is gone. Just too darn slow, even with 256MB of RAM. It's a shame that kids websites these days rely so much on Flash and the like which means that older machines just can't cut it. I'd love it, but I already have 5 computers and I'm not allowed any more.