Quite true all, and thanks for the responses... just making sure there wasn't some secret treasure-trove I'd missed out on.
Obviously a replacement of either the board or the whole machine is in order; cost's an issue, so I'll figure out something.* I just want to take this opportunity to wish the memory limits on the last-generation Intel Macs weren't so unenthusing... sure, 3GB is "three times" the ~1GB most of the PPCs could fit, but that's ridiculous compared to the headroom in any $400 Turion machine from the past 3 years, argh! (The owner apparently wishes to dabble in 3D animation, so he'll wind up using as much as he can fit. That goes for CPU, too, but assuming there's paid-for PPC sofware involved, anything short of a Mac Pro would only be a mild improvement.)
The other "argh" is that, in my experience with secondhand laptops, the disk has always been bashed around under unknown circumstances and will fail at the least-opportune moment. I keep doing this to myself with my own purchases, but I wish I could avoid it when I have to give other people advice [and will inevitably get the call for a need-it-yesterday teardown and data recovery].
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*The footnote is that replacing the board (or much of the machine) with a PPC equivalent would still be under half the cost of an Intel-era replacement that'd still be obsolete enough to demand replacement in 2 years. So this is an awkward situation to be in!
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Just venting... now I just need to get the disk out and go over their options with them.
@Bloodline, how much RAM do you have in that thing? I've got a relative limping along on a Mini [due for replacement this year] and 1GB/1.5GHz is still enough for browsing, letter-writing, and... well, CS2 as long as you stick with screen resolutions. Watching Hulu seems a bit CPU-limited, but now we can say it's no worse than an Atom... Maybe you need to port AROS to it? :>
