Hmm... I have a rather tall stack of G4 Powerbook and iBook systems, and I didn't think they were fetching more than about £15 a unit now. I am making a netboot-based lab out of them, but perhaps I will thin down the crowd a bit and part with a few if they still fetch a decent price.
Now, on to the topic:
General browsing, as mentioned, will be fine. You won't be ablke to stream video (no Netflix, as an example) as client software support (plugins) such as Silverlight, or current Flash simply do not exist for the PowerPC architecture.
Other websites, such as eBay, will also likely give you some trouble, if they are JS/CSS/Dynamic Content.
You may actually see a benefit out of this for Google, and Google Images, as the older Safari and Firefox browsers will load the non-COP-intensive versions of the engines, making the iBook a decent academic and work platform.
I suggest a few things:
Dump Leopard, and install Tiger (10.4.9 through 10.4.11). This will greatly ease your RAM usage, and your OS install footprint, saving you HDD space.
If you are only using this at one location, and can cable it by ethernet to a LAN, you will see a great improvement over the built-in WiFi. You can also set up a Netboot OS install, and use that, if you want to further save on HDD space, but the iBook is only 100bT, not Gigabit, so it isn't ideal for a NB environment.
Tiger will, in any event, cut your CPU usage and RAM usage by about 25%.
Good utilities for the iBook (hosted from one of my remote accounts on insomnia247, for easy downloading):
There are three pieces of software that I find essential on G3 and G4 systems...
SideTrack: Adds tap zones for left/right click, and scroll, tot he trackpad.
MenuMeters: Adds gauges for CPU usage, RAM usage (including swap), network traffic, and HDD usage; you can show or hide any of these four in any combination, and fine tune them.
Process Wizard: THis allows you to fine-tune the process priority of software, and is very useful on G3 and g4 systems, or any PPC system if you want to run CPU-intensive software. For example, I use it to give VLC a higher priority, when i am watching videos, and then drop the priority to minimal, when VLC is idle. This helps with otherwise jittery video.
VLC for PowerPC: An assortment of PowerPC VLC versions that run on 10.3 through 10.5. 0.8.6i is the most stable with a working play-list, but fails to play some codecs; whereas v0.9.6 plays newer codecs, but the play-list is broken.
If you need any other PowerPC software, please ask. I have a sizeable repository on one of my servers. If you ask by category of software, I can provide a list of what i have available.
As
SideTrack is
no-longer sold by the developer, I put a .txt file with the key on the server I would not have done this if it was still
possible to buy it,
which it is not. The programme is shareware, and the key only removes the shareware reminder that materialises every hour or two. It does not add any functions, and the programme runs in shareware mode perpetually without the key.
The iBook comes with 256 MB soldered to the logicboard, with one slot for expansion: if your iBook comes with 512 MB, that means there's a 256 MB chip in that slot. You can change that out for a 1 GB stick, and have a maximum of 1.25 GB of RAM.