I bought my G3 Powerbook some years ago and I still love it, but it was reaaally choking when I was editing images, and the 20GB disk was full. At that point, the whole machine just crawled because, with only 256MB of RAM and a full disk, it would spend most of the time swapping with hardly any swap space anyway. Argh.
I finally got fed up with it and stuck in 1GB of RAM and a new Hitachi TravelStar 80GB hard disk. I'd like to report that I can take out the Airport card, heat shield, heat sink, processor card, RAM, and hard disk, disconnect the PRAM battery, replace the RAM in both the upper and lower slots, change the hard disk, and reassemble everything in under 4 minutes...because I was cooking breakfast at the same time and completed the whole operation just before the 4-minute egg timer went off. :-) Unfortunately, the reason I am so fast at it is because I had originally ordered what I thought was the right kind of RAM, but ended up being G4 RAM, and had to [dis]assemble the thing too many freakin' times before determining that it was the new RAM that was bad. Feh.
I do notice better performance with the RAM in place, but I really notice the new disk performance. My old hard drive was 4200 rpm and the new one is 7200...and is so quiet that I sometimes have to listen carefully to figure out whether the machine is on. Wicked stealthy.
Now that I have my new version of OS X installed on the new disk, have my shell set back to zsh, have fooled around with important stuff like setting my prompt ("ooooh!") and aliasing rm to rm -i ("ahhhhh!"), I can settle down to styling the printable schedule for PATHSFEST with Prince. I loved Prince before, but the new version...well, it just keeps getting more and more fabulous.