Best upgrades for under $100

Question

I suppose it's my turn to ask a few basic questions. Someone gave me a Beige G3 desktop. It has a 300 mhz processor. And it has OS x 10.2.8 The only upgrade I have done has been to put in one 256 ram chip. I would like to make a few other upgrades to it, but not for very much money since I also have a mac mini that I use primarily. The G3 is used mostly as an extra computer for family to jump online with. It also has it's original 6 Gig hard-drive of which 4 gigs are used. I have a few different questions and perhaps someone could point me towards the right post, if they have been asked (I couldn't find them on my own).
1. I was interested in getting the larger vram chip for it, but after reading one of the posts, it was recomended to get a graphics card instead. Will a pci card just bypass the vram? In other words, do I just pick up a graphics/video card and forget the internal vram exists?
2. Here is a little more wide open question. If you were in my shoes and you wanted to make important upgrades for a total of about $100, what would be your "no-brainer" prioritized list? I have been looking for a list of prioritized upgrades, but haven't found any.
Thanks to any who reply.
G3 Beige Desktop 300 mhz   Mac OS X (10.2.x)  

Answer 1

Since this is a secondary computer, and because its market value is negligible, I wouldn't recommend a processor upgrade. The stock 300 MHz (with 1 MB L2 cache) processor is certainly more than adequate for your expressed usage. Having enough RAM for running OS X is necessary, so the additional 256 MB DIMM that you added to the existing memory (? MBs) may be enough. The motherboard has a slot for a 2 MB or 4 MB SGRAM SO-DIMM for graphics enhancement. Used pulls are available at eBay for $5 now plus shipping. As for video cards, a Mac can use multiple cards for multiple displays (if desired), so (unlike PCs) you don't need to use the "Device Manager" or go into the BIOS setup to disable the onboard graphics chip. The video card must be Mac-compatible, meaning that it's programmed with a Mac ROM. Used Mac cards are available on eBay for $30 and under, like ATI's Radeon 7000 or the Rage Pro 128 for under $20. A graphics card with a faster onboard processor will provide faster screen redraws, and will be an asset, especially if the Mac will be connected to high-speed internet. Any of the widely-available IDE (E-IDE) hard drives sold in computer/electronics/office supply stores can be used in the beige G3, so if storage capacity is needed, you can get a new drive for around $40 or less (with or without rebates). Beyond the extra disk space, new drives run cooler, faster, and have larger caches. Even on the stock ATA bus, you'll notice a speed/performance difference. The onboard controller can't recognize any drive greater than 137 GBs, so that means that a 120 GB (or less) is the target size to purchase. You can install a larger capacity drive, but anything beyond 128 GBs of formatted space will be unrecognized/unused. A USB PCI card is a convenient add-on, especially if you'd like to use current printers, flash drives, scanners, etc. with your beige G3. Avoid the Belkin cards having the Opti-based chipset. I've had no problems with the IOGEAR 2-port USB 2.0 card. In order of priority, I'd place memory first (which you've done), a graphics card second, a larger capacity hard drive third, and a USB PCI card fourth. You may also want to consider replacing the stock 24x CD-ROM drive with a CD-RW drive, but with a USB flash memory stick, files could be transferred to the Mac Mini for burning to CD, so that probably wouldn't be needed. I will point out that I upgraded my beige G3s with RAM, a Radeon graphics card, USB and FireWire cards, CD-RW drive, and larger capacity hard drives in some. I couldn't begin to recover the total investment in each unit, if I sold any of them today. If you set a $$ limit before upgrading, you'll keep from going overboard.