I am a collector of Macs from around this time. I just picked up an orange G3 Clamshell iBook, and I absolutely adore my 'pixar lamp' iMac G4.
I'm considering internal hardware mod projects to get these two up to a reasonable speed.
I have the tools to fix it, but no longer possess the manual dexterity. Sadly, it will probably end up in the garbage because my local Apple Store won't take it back for recycling.
If you were anywhere near Toronto I'd take it off your hands. I specifically want broken units for my hardware mods as I feel bad intentionally destroying a functioning unit. It's just kinda shitty to collectors.
Any thoughts on what you might do with yours? I did some research and there seems to be a few options at various levels of the stack but all with efforts levels that far exceed my current resources. Some guys say they have NetBSD running on it ... there’s another guy who figured out the idiosyncratic video interface so you can gut it if you want and reppace the innards with something more modern (it doesn’t feel right to me).
I thought it might see some use as a sexy remote terminal for my main computer but nope - it couldn’t even do VNC without vertically flipping the right hand half of the image. Something to do with the screy nvidia drivers I presume ... incidentally the reason why there’s not much in the way of interesting Linux support. I might use it as an emacs terminal maybe now that I think of it. It sure is pretty though!