Congrats. BeigeG3's are great machines. I have a Rev B minitower that I upgraded to 500MHz and 640MB of RAM. It has a Rage Orion card in it with 32MB of VRAM and Panther runs great on it. I also stuck an ATA/100 card and a 40GB Maxtor HD in it. It's surprisingly quick for what I use it for.

For the price you paid and the specs you got, I think you got a great deal. Considering that you have a Rev C ROM you shouldn't have any problems with slave drives. You might also get lucky and have the newer VRM module that allows for G4 ZIF CPU's to be installed. I can only imagine how much more of a speed increase I would get if I stuck a 600MHz G4 in my machine.

I don't have the cash to buy the 1GHz G3 or 1GHz G4 upgrades that are available. That being said I wouldn't mind picking one up for around $125 or so. Then it would be very fast machine and I dare say that Tiger would run pretty good on it. I have a flashed Radeon 9000 with 256MB of RAM on it. I could install it and activate quartz extreme via the hack.

Anyway I could ramble on for a long time about the various upgrade paths available for the G3 minitowers.

Congratulations on getting an awesome machine and a laptop for $20 and local pickups at that. Very nice.