Although we have plenty of PCs at home I'm thinking of getting a used Mac for general use. My eldest daughter (10) likes her drawing and I may also get a Wacom tablet so she can play with computer graphics as well (it would make a change from her playing Sims on the PC 
).
What sort of processor speed should I be looking at for a decent graphics experience? At the moment I'm heading down the route of a G4 mini tower.
All suggestions welcome.
I think a mac mini with an intel processor is likely to do a far better job tbh.
Though people used graphics tablets/older versions of photshop etc just fine on G4s. For a 10 year old I'm sure it'll be fine. Though the intels are a step up, the G4 would need to be very cheap.
BTW note some of the cheapest wacoms are PC only, be sure to get a mac one.
Seems you can get a G4 tower, 17" screen, keyboard and mouse for about £130.
Thanks for the info on the wacoms..... I'll look out for that.
Aren't G4s struggling with flash 10 /youtube type video sites?
You might need quite an old tablet (or possibly one of the several hundred quid pro ones might have a driver) for the drivers to work on the G4, also the operating system will be not so great, much newer software won't work, and a lot of newer hardware will be flaky.
For drawing with a graphics tablet you'd be best off just fitting the tablet to an existing PC. A G4 tower is really a creaking heap of badness, not to mention being incredibly power hungry, and very noisy sometimes (we used to develop with them, and half the time they sounded like a plane taking off). The G4 towers are a big part of the reason they went to Intel processors (the fact they could never make a decent laptop was the other big reason).
There's no massive advantage to an Intel Mac for drawing (potentially some other advantages of a Mac though if you like them), a G4 mac will be actively worse than even a £200 PC, particularly if you want to attach new hardware to it or browse the internet.
For a kid painting & drawing, you want a graphics tablet, and probably want Artrage (http://www.artrage.com/ ) which costs a bit of money (not much - I think it is $20 for an okay version), or potentially mypaint (http://mypaint.intilinux.com/ ), which is free and very powerful, but has quite a steep learning curve for a kid (artrage is dead easy to use).
I've got a wacom bamboo, and it is a pretty good tablet for the price - only has pressure sensing not tilt, but I didn't have £300 to spend on the intuous professional ones just to do a few bits of illustration. I have done a fair bit of work on it (probably 50 hours or so) and it is still great. I have the one with a touch pad on it - that is a waste really, I only got that version because the pen it comes with is better than the most basic one. I think all the wacoms support macs if you must go that way, although whether or not they will support as old an OS as you're likely to find on a G4, or non-intel macs, I don't know.
Joe
I'm going to be flogging my trusty g4 tower soon - dual 867mhz MDD with various upgrades, most reliable machine I've ever owned, never let me down, although they are nicknamed the 'windtunnel' for goof reason. For illustration work and general DTP it would be fine, but I'd agree, you'd be better off getting a mac mini off eBay
Cheers guys......... very informative. No G4 then!
So what's the deal with the Mac mini - they've been mentioned a few times.
My studio was downsized last year and we have some G5 Towers knocking about. Would be a good starter machine for graphics work.
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