I thank you ALL for your responses, which are so much appreciated. TBH I sometimes feel kinda lonely here with the full weight of tech-support on my shoulders. I shouldn't feel that way because (a) I have been using Macs since 1986 and have installed and converted up and up through the range ever since; and (b) there is masses of help available, now, on the internet. The lonely feeling derives from being the only one here with that background and I used to work in a big IT department with other shoulders to lean on, PLUS in those days, they weren't my computers, I could go home at the end of the day and leave things to someone else!
Anyway. We've had a Big Discussion here and decided to replace both old trusty-G4s. They work, they're in full production, but parts of them are no longer reliable (power-on on one, disk burning on another) which makes me very uneasy and adds to the stress which is inherent in running a DTP business.
I have done HOURS of research and do not make buying decisions lightly! I've now bought a G4 MDD dual processor tower from Amazon, which should arrive by the end of the week. The specification is as high as I can achieve for what I want, which is booting into OS9 for those applications for that job in this office. I've got a retail OS9 on its way in the post and also have a version of Norton (never used) which will work on OS9 and OSX for disk recovery/maintenance.
The other trusty-G4, I've sourced and bought an iMac G4 (the one which looks like a desk lamp) which will come in original box with all original parts and original System Disks. I've got Disk Warrior for OSX (also never used).
While you're there, thank you for reading my posts and treating me decently. If you didn't, I would have left by now. Why do I mention this? Shouldn't anyone on a forum like this expect to be treated decently? Well, I dipped a toe into the e-Bay "community" forum and asked a question about computers being sold without their system disks (prompted by responses here). The response was so hostile that it made me blink. After a few hours I replied calmly that I have been using computers for YEARS and do my research and know what I'm looking for, adding that a hostile response to an e-Bay newbie was unwelcoming.
The next response was so ad hominem that I goggled at the screen. The person said that "I did not know what I was doing, had no idea about computers, should get some proper IT support, and should not be going onto eBay and 'buying things at random' ". So I did the only thing possible there. I hit the Report button and left.
PayPal's driving me round the twist too, but that's another topic.
