"slimming down" os x for use on my old imac

I have an iMac G3 333Mhz with 512 Mb RAM which I am installing OS X Tiger on. What are some good tips for making Tiger run as fast as possible on this older machine? Is it possible to disable most of the graphical effects or stop some processes which may not be necessary? I am only using this computer for web browsing, instant messaging, and word processing.

Well, you can save some space by deleting all of the language packs that you won't use. Just search the forums for that one. Get rid of all your Dashboard widgets, or even better, don't use Dashboard at all. Keep your runnung programs to a minimum, disable all of the menu displays that you can, and keep your dock items to a minimum. I'm sure there are other things that you can do to cap your RAM usage, but I don't really have any other ideas.

To get rid of extra languages Monolingual is a good program. Here is a link:

http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/

Getting rid of dashboard like Jeff said would be a good idea. If you have got a copy of 'Panther' OSX 10.3 then install that as it hasn't got the extra graphics card based features that OSX 10.4 has got and is better suited to older machines whilst still being a solid system.

Turn off things like the 'Animate opening applications' in system preferences under 'Dock'. I'd also suggest going to the 'Energy Saver' settings in 'System prefs' and turn off 'Put hard disk to sleep when possible' as my iMac 333 seemed to have a problems with that and would take a while for the disk to spin back into life.

u should download MainMenu....its a free app that allows u to run all of the maintnance tasks whenever u want to right from ur toolbar...according to istat nano, before running MainMenu, i had 1.3gb of my 2gb ram free, with no applications running. After running some maintnance tasks, i had 1.75 gb free. it can really make a differnce. google it.