Mac Woes

[warning - techwhinge ahead!]
The next time I meet someone who starts on about "how simple apple macs are to use, how intuitive, how user-friendly they are" I have either one of two options: I shall either cry in front of them, or I shall gather the strength to throw my secondhand beige G3 at them, and hope that either the box itself or some of its many attendant external gizmos (larger hard disk, optical reader etc etc etc) catch them on the back of the head and knock some sense back in.

Now, I fully accept that Macs are the coolest designed things on the planet, and they look lovely, but they are so non-intuitive it has reduced me to a pit of frustration. I only needed a cheap old mac to test websites on, so I duely paid £25 for an old G3 from the local paper. It had an OS X 10.1 disk, which was already installed and working, so I thought I would be okay.

Last night I nearly completely; broke it, because I wanted to persuade the damn thing to reinstall, and to start afresh. I am now sitting with OS 8.2 which looks like Windows 3.1 or older, and I can't find the system folder for OS X to restart. I can't boot off the CD, it just says "click to restart and it will install" and then just reboots into the same old, useless OS. At other times, it just sits there sulking at me, it's external drives consuming energy and making a racket.

Nowhere does it explain what the Option Key is - the Command key is always follwed by that strange curly shape so you know which one that is, but I had to look it up on the internet to see which one was 'option'. The UK keyboard still has the quotes and the @ in the wrong place, the mouse is so limited because you can only click - what happened to scrolling and context-sensitive clicking. You can't get a CD or a floppy out easily, and its just as well that I only want the browser because there seems to be no other useful applications built-in, and I don't want to be paying a fortune for Microsoft Word!

Now, I am not a die-hard windows-head - there is a Linux server sitting beneath me as I type this, and I have used nearly everything in nearly two decades of IT experience, with the exception of a Mac which I could never afford, so I am not a noddy, but why oh why oh why is this thing so damn hard to figure out!

If anyone has any ideas to prevent this becomming a rather heavy doorstop, how I can get OS X back, upgrade it perhaps, then please advise. Until thn, I can't even play a game on it. Aaaarrrggghhhhh!
[end of techwhinge]

I shall avoid the temptation to try and make some analogy between my mac woes and the church or yoof.min not merely because a) it would be crass and pointless b) if we are a community we should be able to speak of matters beyond church - God is in this (although I suspect it's the other one who sits inside the Mac) ... somewhere c) I havn't got the energy becvause when I am not trying to coax the mac into being useful I am up at the crematorium at the moment.

Your advice appreciated, though.