Here's my report to the class on how my upgrades worked out.
(By the way this is what I started out with: 2002 G4 Quicksilver (AGP) 733mz - which I learned is what they call the "Education" Quicksilver; No SuperDrive; a 4x-8x(?) CD burner; 114MG ram; two internal drives - 40GB ATA master plus 10GB ATA; an Audiophile Delta 2496 audio PCI card; standard Nivida 2 or 4? AGP graphics card; and just to make me look dumber than you might already deduce, a second PCI video card (TwinTurbo) from a company no longer in business and who's last drivers were for OS8.
First, I replaced the old CD burner with an internal SuperDrive from MCE with dual layer support. MCE sends a driver updater CD which I installed first. The drive went in fine, slam bamm thank you mam. Only used it once or twice since and it has a noticeable improvement in speed.
Second, with maestro's advice, I put in the Radeon 9000. Again, I installed whatever came on the CD. First onto the OS9 partition then the OS 10.3 partition (I'll explain later). Then I disabled the old TwinTurbo extentions which worked with that card yet I feared would lead to big problems. Then I put in the new Radeon card. Wowie, wow wow. I hadn't even gotten to the processor part of all this and my machine went from EtchaSketch speed to zippy. I should have done that a couple of years ago.
Now the caveats. Back in OS 10.1 days I tried my first foray into OSX with classic. It was a dog. For some reason I partitioned my 40GB drive into two halves. Other than the time hassle of rebooting every time I had to switch it worked for me. As I tend to work a lot in OS9 it seemed the best way to go. But I noticed that with only about a third the number of apps, my OS 10 partition was getting full (about 17GB) whereas OS9 with three times as many apps was only about 7GB. So just before I installed the processor I did some clean up, and backed-up both the OS9 and OS10 to a firewire drive, using Retrospect. Then I repartitioned my 40GB to 30/10 with OSX getting the bigger part. The mistake I made was that I missed the fine print in Retrospect and learned that when backing up OSX you have to launch Retrospect in that OS. I tried it from OS9 and learned that part of my backup (OSX) was useless. Unfortunately that was where I stored my "before" processor upgrade bench test results. So I had to reinstall OSX on that partition.
For the third part, I installed the Sonnet 1.3GHZ Encore/ST Duet or Dual Processor card. Again the instructions were great and the installation was easy with the exception of one screw holding down the power card which is difficult to access because of the protruding cooling fan of the new processor. It booted up fine and send "after" bench tests to anyone who wants them. Sorry, no "before" test results and don't feel like taking out my new processor just to have them.
And finally the fourth part. Again I must give kudos to maestro. That FirmTek SATA Raid idea was killer. I ended up getting the internal Seritek like he suggested and two Western Digital 160GB 7200rpm SATA drives at about $90ea. The documentation seemed excellent with great instructions for whatever machine of set up you have. The only problem I had was getting 8 screws to attach the drives to their respective plates and coming up with a second SATA 7-pin cable which I neglected to order with the card. It only comes with one.
Everything works fine except for a couple of problems. One, whenever I start up from the OS9 partition the machine hangs up right after loading all the extentions. I have to do a hard re-start and then everything works fine. That's the only problem. There's a firmware update for one of the things I installed (I think it's the ATI card) but it says that it's not needed on my machine. The second is more of a disappointment than a problem and I think is just the way things are. To wit, the raid is only viewable in OSX. I tried to install the OS9 drivers and then use the Drive Set-up to set up the striped 0 raid in OSX but I don't think you can do both.
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