Every line of notebook has its issues. I won a couple more parts 15" to play with, they are cheap enough.
I think to a large degree the point that's laboring to be made here is that:
A: The G4 Powerbooks, no matter how good or bad they may have been relative to their competition at the time, do have some known issues that are depressingly common in some instances, and:
B: Those issues were showing up back when the units were three or less years old. Now even the very youngest PBG4s are pushing over the decade mark. There may be some exceptions but generally speaking electronics don't improve with age. (Particularly when some of the known failure modes involve the cracking of lead-free solder which, again, started cropping up when the machines were still AppleCare-able, it's sorta silly to think that said solder joints just stopped being lousy at some indeterminate point after manufacture.)
In any case, these facts probably don't matter much in the case of someone wanting a laptop as a "toy", but where the discomfort comes in is it's been expressed that the desire for this laptop is founded at least in part in wanting to use it as a "daily driver" in place of an, again, 10 year newer machine. Anyone who buys a PB G4 should go into it expecting that it'll fall down dead tomorrow, so if it costs more than funny money, well... you're asking for regret.
(What constitutes "funny money" is of course subjective. For some people $100 may well be funny money. Doesn't sound like it here, though.)
Someone suggested Linux, much as I like and support Ubuntu, I dont want to try running my regular apps through Wine. The Acer has already demonstrated it can't handling running Firefox natively without struggling to scroll down pages.
But, wait, Linux is out because you don't want to run your "regular apps" through WINE, but you somehow are going to run those same apps under Tiger on a G4?
Re: the performance question way back, the Geekbench 2 results for the ACER would be around 3,000, vs. 966 for the very, very fastest Powerbook G4. (I searched for results from the same CPU.) And note that this actually understates the performance advantage of the Intel box; Geekbench 2 was sort of notorious for favoring PowerPC over Intel because it assigned very low weights to things like memory bandwidth and high weights to certain Altivec-friendly floating point and transform functions. The Celeron in the Acer is more like six times faster than the G4 in memory and stream tests, which are rated heavier in Geekbench 3. I'm almost certain the cruddy performance you're seeing on your new machine is due to it being positively riddled with bloatware, not because the hardware intrinsically sucks.
