At my school we have a few older eMacs
PowerPC G4, 700 or 800 MHZ 128 ram 40 gig
Does anyone know how far I can upgrade the ram? and do you think that this will allows teh eMacs to run some more intense software like iMovie or iDVD.
I would love to use these to build movies and upload the movies to our other Macs that have burning abilities.
Right now though every process is a slow spinning wheel of frustration for our students.
Any other suggestions, I have check the updates run file permissions with I thought might help the speed. There is lots of space on the hard drives
Another good upgrade is the hard drive, replacing the 5400rpm stock with a 7200rpm will increase performance. It certainly did for me.
But the hard drive on first generation eMacs, requires quite a thoughrough dismantling and is potentially very dangerous because of charges contained in the CRT.
To answer one of the original questions, with upgraded ram those machines will be fine for iMovie and iDVD. The speed issues you're seeing are ram related.
IMHO you should have at least 512MB of ram for OSX and more if you want do much more than the basics (like iMovie, iDVD). If you put 1G per machine they will feel like brand new machines!
Another good upgrade is the hard drive, replacing the 5400rpm stock with a 7200rpm will increase performance. It certainly did for me.
But the hard drive on first generation eMacs, requires quite a thoughrough dismantling and is potentially very dangerous because of charges contained in the CRT.
Replacing the HD on the older eMacs requires disconnecting the CRT cable. As mentioned there are potentially high voltages. Also remember this cable was supposedly the cause of the infamous raster shift issue. I would be very reluctant to touch the HD in one of these machines.
If you need extra HD space to handle iMovies and so on; get an external firewire drive.
As mentioned max out the RAM at 1GB and you should see a big performance bump.
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I second the option of using an external FireWire Drive.
Keep the core O/S on the eMacs and use the external drives for various student projects. This helps safegaurd files in case one of these older units dies. Students can also move from Mac to Mac and take their project files with them.
When the school is ready to upgrade (whether its one computer at a time or a bulk purchase) the whole process will be much easier.
Max out the RAM, keep the O/S and iLife apps up to date, and you should be able to get a few more years out of these old work horses.
I would be very reluctant to touch the HD in one of these machines. 
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