The only reservation which I would have about these projects is that, if you go out and buy an older iMac, buy the additional RAM to max it out, and then BUY the Sonnet Harmoni upgrade kit, I am not so sure that it is really the best use of your funds. You could easily get yourself into a situation where for only a small incremental increase in funds you could buy a brand new consumer Macintosh which would be all that much better.
Definitely. The 799-dollar eMac comes to mind, obviously. Even if you have to spend another hundred bucks or so for a good 512mb RAM chip, you're still better off buying the new machine. The price won't be much different, plus you get a 1gHz G4, a combo drive, a bigger screen, a much more robust video card, and far more hard drive space. Hard to argue with that.
On the other hand, if you current own a Rev/A to Rev/B iMac, have already maxed out its RAM or were planning to do so anyway, and really want to hang onto the old bird, then the Sonnet Harmoni kit may be a worthwhile investment to you.
There's also that intangible, the urge to tinker. I have a Rev D iMac I'm not using, and the temptation to fiddle with it is almost unbearable. I don't know that I'd drop the cash to upgrade the processor, but a bigger, faster hard drive (to replace the now-pathetic 6gb original one) and another 256mb RAM chip (bringing it to 512mb total) wouldn't cost too much and would let my veteran blueberry gumdrop run the latest Mac OS. There's something uniquely satisfying in such things, even though you'll always end up tilting at windmills.
Steve W.
P.S. Almost forgot to mention that you can buy a CD-RW upgrade to the tray-loader iMacs from MCE that includes a matching face plate on the drive. Pity it's 200 dollars, though, plus you have to either install it yourself or pay someone to do it for you.
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