Well,another lesson in always try to see the whatever plugged in!
The imac mini's hard drive is bad,just chatters,never loads,but substituting a spare 20gb laptop drive confirms the G4 itself works.
Trying to get seller to replace drive; if he doesn't it still wasn't a bad price.
It IS the 1.25Ghz ,256 RAM,with 32mb video but that should still be much better than the efikas' 400mHz and 128 RAM.
And a 1GB RAM stick is on the Christmas list!