Thanks a million for the offer sunburyboy93, that would have been just the ticket. As luck would have it I got a free G4 powermac last week, my brother in law got me it as well as getting himself a rather nifty widescreen g5 iMac for doing a few favours for an old boss.
It's not exactly cutting edge but is about as good as it gets for a g4 powermac: 1.5g ram, 2 hard drives totalling 180gb, dvd burner and 10.4 with a frightening amount of software. Works a treat for internet, music, photo and video. No wi-fi but until I work up the courage to spend a few quid on an airport card my ubuntu running laptop is happy to share its wifi connection.
Thanks again. The way things have panned out I'm scheming starting a thread about cheap hookers and coke soon.
Went round to granny in-laws, different side of the family, last week. She gave me her debit card and asked me to renew her Norton antivirus. Quite pleased that I managed to convince her to ditch it and try the free stuff. She's 85 and went for it as someone at her church mentioned Norton was a rip off too, a week in and all is well. Convincing the inlaws might be a bigger challenge. The past few weeks have also been my first interactions with Windows Vista, first impressions are 'piece of shit', it seems unbelievably poor. Getting a printer to print took almost an hour, I booted it up with linux puppy from a pen drive and printed. I then went back to vista and three reboots, which took an age, later it was printing. My freind can't use his vista laptop wireless with his old BT homehub type thing, after about an hour of google the best I could get was that sometimes it just doesn't work. Is vista really that bad? or am I just a Vista newbie? at least with ubuntu you tend to find either how to do something or that you can't do something rather quickly.