Planning a eMac restore soon, just wanted to make sure I've covered my bases.

[maximumzero]

Hey MacOS9Lives Forum Users,

I have a eMac in the closet at my parents' place that I purchased way back in 2003 in my move from high school to college. It's a 2003 model: 1Ghz G4, 1GB of RAM, 160GB HDD, 32MB Radeon 7500, Superdrive.

I've replaced the Superdrive at one point during its life, as the original one either died on me or started having issues reading newer DVDs (don't remember) upgraded the RAM from what it shipped with (I believe 256MB) to 1GB and added an Airport Extreme card way back in the day.

My parents actually used the computer for a short time when I moved to my first Intel iMac in 2008, but unfortunately the hard drive gave up the ghost not long afterwards, and it was relegated to a closet. I'm rather glad that I didn't sell it, give it away, or otherwise recycle it, because I'm anxious to tinker with it soon.

Over the weekend while going through some old boxes at their place I actually found my original eMac restore discs, Apple Hardware Test, Applecare Disc, and even the Encyclopedia media software that shipped with the computer. This is exciting because I really thought it was lost to time. On top of that I have the original Pro keyboard and mouse it shipped with as well. They seem to be in decent shape, thankfully, and should work fine.

The wife and I currently live in an apartment and I don't really have the space to work on the computer at the moment, nor do I have a place to set it up once I'm done fixing it up, but a house purchase is on the horizon so I'm anxious to get it back up and running. I'm thinking I'll probably load it up with old edutainment software and movies and use it as a "Entertainment Station" for our future kids--keeping it off the internet in the process.

So here's the plan.
Open computer and replace old HDD.
Replace G4 thermal paste.
General case & fan dust cleanout.

I'm eyeballing OWC's SSD kits. I know the ATA bus on the computer will limit the computer's actual data read/write speed, but the idea of making the computer quieter is super appealing, especially when I remember the fan on that thing being fairly load to begin with. In addition a solid state drive will likely outlast any mechanical hard drive I put in there, and will outlast the life of the computer itself, meaning I should never have to open it back up again. I figure I'll go with the 500GB drive, which is probably overkill as hell, but I'd really like this to be a one and done solution.

While I'm in there I'll also pull off the heatsink, remove the existing thermal pad and paste, clean those up, and replace it with some Arctic Silver. I figure the popular MX-4 should be fine, unless ya'll want to suggest something else.

Anything else I should be doing/looking at while I'm under the hood? I can't think of anything else but I'd love to hear from ya'll.

Since it's a "Superdrive" model it's technically the first eMac to get hit with the MacOS 9 cutoff, but I'm hopeful the "MacOS 9.2.2 for Unsupported Models" will get me up and running. I'll likely run the OS X restore discs and partition the drive out with 100GB for OS 9 and the remaining 400GB for OS X.

Should upgrade to 10.5.8 on the OS X side of things first or just run the restore discs (10.3) and then tackle OS 9 afterwards?

Anything I'm forgetting or additional that I should do on the hardware or software side while I'm fixing 'er up?

Thanks.