How long to stretch out the next powermac upgrade?

[ph0rk]

My main desktop machine is currently a dual g4 500, 1.38GB of ram, radeon 9000/64, pushing a pair of dell 1905FP's

Yes, it is a bit old.

Obviously, at some point in the (perhaps near) future, it needs to be replaced. The question is when?

It gets used for websurfing, eyetv, dvds (I currently have no TV), dvd burning, music jukebox, printing, file serving to my laptop, word processing, and light audio editing (interview recordings). It does most of these things fine, (though there is an issue with the current radeon 9000 driver for tiger, making apple dvd player useless - VLC works, but it is less than ideal).


If it does all these fine, and I have a rev D. 15" albook, why am I worrying about upgrading? Because I know that at some point in the next 5-6 years it is as good as a certainty - a dual 500 g4 won't last me forever. But, I am in grad school for an MA right now, and plan on starting work on a PhD next fall. So I need to plan as few upgrades as possible during that time. As you might guess, having the latest and greatest isn't that important to me. I just know that I'll have to upgrade, and I'd like to try to keep it down to, say, one or two upgrades between now and when I finish with grad school (another 5-6 years).

Any suggestions for upgrade strategies welcome.

 

[finalcoolman]

Yup, that's old. In my opinion you wont want the first rev. Intel Powermac. In fact you'd probaly want to stay off Intel for at least a couple years if you have a nice Mac already. I plan to get my first Intel Mac a couple of years after the transition too. So, if I were you I'd wait till the next Powermac revision which will almost definantly be the last PowerPC PowerMac as it will be a VERY nice machine. Then I'd stick with the for a good 4-5 years, then when you replace that machine with an Intel PowerMac it will be verrrry mature.