External Harddrive - Only one at a time?

Question

I've found that I cannot get two external USB 2.0 harddrives to show up at the same time, hub or no hub, whatever I try. I also can't connect an external DVD-RW drive. It doesn't even show up at all. The harddrives, when they do connect, are slower than molasses. Much faster on the windows machine. Now, in all cases, these have worked before. I have a first gen G4 1.42GHz PPC... is this thing just getting old? I'm going to try to install leopard on it tonight... Is that even wise? I'm running 1GB of ram, so it should be...
On an entirely different note, I am an American in Japan, and wondering how going about buying some more apple products will work out with customer service. Although I speak elementary Japanese, it is certainly NOT enough to deal with Japanese tech support- and I wouldn't want to. I also am a junior high-school teacher, and wondering if I am eligible for and education discounts.

Answer 1

Systems slow down and begin misbehaving for two basic reasons - firstly (and most commonly) OS and applications get more and more bloated, so consume greater and greater amounts of CPU time, and hog greater RAM and system resources. Secondly, hardware issues where component tolerances affect overall performance - in each instance this is marginal, though the cumulative effects can be noticeable.
In both cases, Macs have a bit of an advantage because neither MacOS or applications tend to bloat at the same rate as Windows/Windows apps, and in hardware terms, one of the reasons Macs cost a little more than equivalent PCs is because hardware components are typically tighter tolerance and therefore less prone to degrade to significant levels.
Of course that doesn't entirely hold true for mechanical devices such as hard drives, where heavy use can create significant wear rates which then render the system liable to slowdowns and even crashing. Video editing is not, however, particularly demanding in terms of the reliability limits of modern hard drives, so the fact you use your system for this would not typically cause a problem - unless of course you are a very heavy user. Even so, you would normally notice other symptoms if the drive were deteriorating - not least errors when you verify it, or increased and unusual noises or crashes.
The problem with installing Leopard at this point is that it introduces another unknown. Assuming you are familiar with the behavior of your system with the current OS, and with the current OS's features and performance, Leopard would do little other than mask the problem and make locating the cause more difficult. It must also be said that you might find it creates an additional performance hit.