need help with "new" dinosaur ibook version 1.12

Hello- new to Mac world!
Our pc took it's last breath last week and we purchased a new iMac today. Very excited to join this community

Our 11 yo also inherited his uncles old iBook last summer and we want him to be able to use it for school and internet access.

Question: what operating system should we buy/ upgrade to and how do we connect to the internet? We do not have administrator access- information was not in the will..with a clean install of new OS will this be ok? Appreciative of any help / direction/ suggestions

We had The chip merchant add 512 MB.
Current is:
Mac OS X 10.2.8(6R73)
hardware:
machine speed 700 mhz
bus speed 100 mhz
machine model iBook version 1.12
total 640 MB

It says it has airport with an ethernet addresss.

I believe the last version of OSX that supported the Power PC processors was OS X.5. It is very hard to find. OS X.4 (Tiger) was not to bad and maybe easier to find.

as for the wireless (airport card), I would assume the worse as in that it is 802.11B because of its age. if your wireless router can support it, there should be no problem.

according to THIS WEBSITE it is in fact 802.11b and you have maxed out the RAM.

there is an airport extreme card that gives it 802.11G, but i do not know if it will work in this particular machine.

I'd go with 10.4 Tiger. 10.5 Leopard will probably run slow on there.

Let me be blunt: I owned one of these machines and loved it when I had it -- a decade ago.

Your 11yo is going to hate this thing unless he's the only kid in his school with a computer. Today's kids are VERY savvy and 11 is a very peer-conscious age.

I would suggest getting him an iPad mini a used Intel MacBook (2008 or later) for the needs you describe.