Can an Apple clamshell do anything?
 

I've been reading aout Apple clamshells and how they're becoming collector's items. So far, from what I understand a beefy drive and airport card are needed to do any modern day multimedia or net stuff. They go on Ebay for about $80. The ones on Ebay seem to mostly come from schools.

Do you have one? Did you have one? Is it worth it?

Collector's items in the computer world are just that. If you want it for a collection or just think it would be neat, it's totally worth it. If you want to use it, it's about 1/5 as costly as something new. But it's also about 1/20 as powerful.

A G3 with a 300–466MHz processor is going to be basically useless. You can probably use 10 year old applications, but they're getting harder and harder to find. Let me know if you want a copy of WriteNow. I still have it on a zip disk.

If you're going to get an iBook, get the G4 model and I wouldn't suggest anything under a 1GHz processor and 1GB of RAM.

I'm thinking mostly I'll just use it to write. Simple stuff. And use whatever other software is on there. We have a pretty beefy Dell that can do most of my multi-media stuff.

It would be nice if e-mail or the internet can be used because the stuff I'll be writing I plan to upload to the innertube.

The problem with using the Dell to write, is that I share it with my SO, and it's in our living room which is kind of odd placement.

The only thing with old computers, is you truly are limited.
Whenever you'd like to upload something, print, browse the web.. It's gonna take much longer. As a text editor, OK. But then you still have to get that data off of it, email it, or print it. It'll be slow, clunky, and me you long for something a tiny but more fresh.

I'm just trying to say, that it's not got the same resources, most often you can't throw stuff on a USB key (which, ironically, might have more storage than the old PC), because of the old OS and hardware.
If there's a problem with it, you'll have to tangle quite a bit more with it than you would a modern-day computer, where for 90% of small problems a google search will solve it.

For about 100 bucks, you'll be better off finding a used P4 desktop, or even P3, have it running Ubuntu, or something, and things will run much smoother for you. That's just my opinion, but a decent desktop from 6 years ago can run ultra smooth on Ubuntu. And you certainly won't be limited in terms of mulitmedia, internet browsing, office applications, etc.