I would have taken the G3 for all the above reasons (RAM, HD, etc.) plus the fact that the G3 will also run OS 8.x.

All the G4's I've picked up (all 2 of them) have had the firmware upgraded, so that you can't run anything under 9.1 on them. I would give a little bit to find a G4 Sawtooth that I could load OS 8.6 on, but sadly, these machines are a rarity. They seem to all suffer from "premature firmware upgradation."

I guess I'll just have to suffer with my 2 UMax S900's, which can also run OS 7.5.5!