Really? Not that I don't trust you, Rob, but I can go ahead and install it here, get my music off this computer, then go home and install iTunes there, establish it as my home computer, and have the music from my work computer still remain on my iPod?

But the music from work computer will not transfer to home computer, right? (Crash course in iPod FAQs this morning.)

Dan, The eMac is a 700MHz G4 with
256K on chip level 2 cache
128MB SDRAM
40Gig Ultra ATA hard disk drive

My friend thought he'd gotten the dvd drive too, until he got it home and nope! just the cd-rw. Not to be greedy (okay, this is totally greedy) but I wishwishwish he'd gotten the dvd!

Your comment about useful software installed hit the mark. My friend did not want to buy Office for OSX (neither do I for that matter...since my 2001 version works just fine), or any of the other software he uses regularly.

So. I'll take that as a ringing endorsement for Panther, eh?

I looked at the new features for Tiger (sheesh) but saw nothing that would blow my skirt up. Hopefully, they'll continue supporting Panther for a while!

Dana, I think if you do what you say, when you sync your iPod to your home computer all the stuff from work will be erased.

Beej, I'd increase the RAM in that computer if I could. If you run multiple applications at once, more RAM will really speed things up.

eta: But if you can't afford it, you can live with what you've got....

But if you use iTunes to put the iPod in manual mode, you can drag music from any number of computers to your iPod. The drawback is that you lose the convenience of automatic syncing.

Oh, cool. I didn't know that. I thought the "sync to only one computer" thing was part of Apple's DRM.

I would recommend getting more RAM, which is yet another reason your friend had trouble.

Your machine uses PC100 or PC133 3.3 volt non-interleaved DIMMS. They are fairly cheap, 256MB [link] for instance, cost around $33-$40.

You will be happy you did.

ETA: Late on posting, looks like I got in a little late. I was looking up the machine and chatting in IM with Andi. heh.

Stupid Windows Media Player (ver 9) won't play my DVD (XP Pro w/ SP2). Anyone else have DVD trouble with WMP?

eta: WinDVD that came with the Dell won't play it either. So something on the machine is frelled. Luckily I have my iBook with me....

Muchas gracias Dan, for the link. Yup. More memory is always good. I can't run OSX on my iMac for that very reason.

Next question. Would 512 be overkill and how hard is it to install the new memory card?

Back in the very, very old days when I worked for Qualitas (386Max...tells you how old those days really were) my training presentation included the sentence, "Don't go opening up that box. That's when the bugs crawl in."

Please tell me things are different now.

Things are different now. You have two slots, if one is open, it'll be easy peasy to thunk a second into the empty slot.

Let me see if I can find an eMac installation guide.

What iMac model do you have? It shouldn't be that big of a deal upgrading ram on that.

I was hoping to find a cheap old-style iMac for my mom, but funds and lack of finding one have put that on hold.