Upgrade options for first edition mac mini

Question

Hello
I have rescued an old mac mini, the thing had been abandoned and mistreated, but its in very good condition.
I am looking to give it a new leash of life but need some advise on which way to go.
The first problem is the original owner has lost the reinstall disk, it has panther on the mac mini but I want to give it a fresh start to get rid off the old user info, he has also installed lots of p2p software which I hate and cannot seem to get rid of it.
So, I want to install leopard, upgrade the memory from 256 to 1gb and buy the new apple keyboard and mouse.
Can I do this, or can I reinstall without the disk also might 256 be enough memory for leopard.
The mac mini only cost me £50 would it be worth it, I feel sorry for it.
Its not the Intel version its a PowerPC G4 model.
Message was edited by: forget it

Answer 1

I don't mean to sound like a know-it-all, Andy, but don't let that membership date for me fool you. I had somehow misplaced the info to log on, and, since I hadn't visited these forums for a while, Apple must have booted me off. I remember your valuable input to early Mac converts from the dreaded Pee Cee who bought the original Mini very well.
The distinction here, though, is one of semantics, and by serious I am referring to a combination of disk-intensive activities, coupled with algorithms in iTunes that have it going out to the 2 sites on the net that will retrieve cover art for personally-owned CDs and DVDs from the iTunes store, and the variety of track/CD data that CDDB provides.
I've tried every possible combination of alternatives to have the Mini behave like a well-disciplined child, here — everything from setting disk access preferences in the finder, to forbidding iTunes to do anything with a newly loaded disc until I tell it to do so. Nothing worked. I've erased the hard drive several times (first as a last resort) and reinstalled Leopard *by itself* and tested the system again to see if I could correct things. I even did this again last night after I had Tiger back up and running on the internal drive: I wiped the external clean, even zeroing out all the data on it, installed another fresh, clean copy of Leopard, requested the upgrade to 10.5.2, reset my iTunes account, then launched a new library. On the second attempt to load a disc into that new library I was back to the same problem that has been plaguing me for more than a month. Meanwhile, the Tiger install is operating perfectly — even willing to accept the massive amount of work that I had already completed so laboriously in Leopard.
I am not suggesting that you are incorrect, only that your own serious applications on a 1.25 GH G4 Mac Mini are not such that they will provoke this misbehavior. It may well be, too, that the unique architecture of this specific class of Mini is such that the problem cannot be replicated on any other PPC Mac that qualifies for the Leopard install. I'll also submit to noting that the Mail and Safari problems that persist on the number of G4-based Macs I support for myself and my clients may, in fact, be due to the shoddy practices of our ISP. No matter what I tell them, we still get unbelievably slow service for a cable connection (sometimes waiting as long as 3 minutes for this forum to appear, no matter which machine we are testing), and we still get a warning (on Leopard only) that the mail certificate does not match.