What would you recommend?

i've searched about for this, and either i'm not hitting the correct search terms, or i'm incompetent... i'm also a relative newcomer to apple-land, having been in pc-land since the beginning of time...

here's what i have and what i would like to do...

i have an airport extreme network...
i have two macbooks...

i would like to:

have a computer that is completely dedicated to running itunes... it would be nice if i could use it as a time machine backup location, but not necessary... it also would be nice if i could use it to feed an appletv someday... i want to be able to run itunes on the machine and use vnc to access it from either macbook (thus not having to have either macbook "active" once itunes is started and running on the other machine)... i want to be able to stuff some large disks in it... i can hardwire it to the router if necessary...

my assumption is that i would have an easier time of things if the "itunes server" (for lack of a better term) was running at least some flavor of osx (this may be a faulty assumption)...

i know i can acquire a used powermac from any number of sources...

the question for you folks is this... what powermac flavor and specs would you start with?

also, any other suggestions would be more than welcome. i'm more than willing to learn.

thanks!

edit: if it's a bad idea, feel free to tell me so too. or if going with a mini with some external firewire drives would be better, tell me that too.

An old Windows or Mac box will do the trick fine. Processing speed is not an issue, but a healthy HDD and a fast Wireless connection are far more important.

I'd say anything above a 2ghz Pentium 4 windows XP box, or a G4 1.0ghz or better would suffice. Newer machines deal with bigger HDDs though, so take that into account.

An OS X machine might be a it easier to configure, yes.

The AppleTV has a slow processor, less than 1GHz, 1GB of RAM and 64 MB of integrated video. A G4 will work over 1GHz but if you ever want to watch HD content you will really need an Intel Mac.

bryphotoguy said:

...if you ever want to watch HD content you will really need an Intel Mac.

Click to expand...

Or a decent G4/G5 system. I have no problem with HD content on my G5 or my PowerBook G4

D3v1L80Y said:

Or a decent G4/G5 system. I have no problem with HD content on my G5 or my PowerBook G4

Click to expand...

I think it was Kash that said his G4 mini couldn't handle HD content smoothly. The mini G4's support the same amount of RAM and have less video memory as a AppleTV but run a much a much more intense version of OS X.
I excluded G5's because they're are only two, the iMac and the Power Mac. They're both too expensive to act as a simple iTunes file server. A G4 or a Intel mini would be cheaper than a G5.

thanks for the replies...

i do have a p4 box lying around doing nothing... i suppose i could press that into service... will my macbooks play nice with it? i.e. will i be able to control it from my laptop?

sorry for the simplistic questions, and sorry if it's in the wrong forum... i could do this in a new york minute in a pc world, but i'm clueless when it comes to cross-platform stuff...

By controlling the PC from your MacBook, would you mean something like screen sharing??

yea, that's the basic idea... the following sequence of events would be what i would want to do...

1) itunes box on all the time to act as a pseudo file server
2) fire up macbook
3) start itunes on itunes box from macbook
4) shut down macbook

i had focussed on getting a powermac because i figured it would be easier to run applications remotely that way (vs. a pc)... i wasn't sure how nicely the mac and pc would play together...

ps. i really like the cat in the mac. how'd you do that?