@ Peter Ferling: I hear ya loud and clear as I'm in a similar boat, unfortunately.
I had a feeling when I pulled the trigger on a gently used Dual G5 earlier this year the end was near, but I didn't think it would be this close.
That said, being able to upgrade from an aging G4 Powerbook (which Apple no longer supports, BTW) to the 2.3 Dual G5, for only $800, plus $100 to max out with 16GB of RAM, put me in a lot better place financially than had I dropped 3x as much on an entry-level MacPro with it's standard configuration.
Hopefully, I can continue to use this machine for at least another 1-2 years until it the economy improves (hopefully soon). Barring catastrophic hardware failure, I should be able to use this as a dedicated scanning workstation for years to come (*knocks on wood*).