Need a little bit of help with my Ibook g4 Mac OSX

Hi! I found this site a few days ago when my boyfriends computer (running xp) took a dump on us! just wanted to say thanks because although it was still extremely frustrating your site was the only place I found that made sence to me and in the end we fixed it! With that said the situation still reminded me how much I missed my ibook and so I bought a used one until I can afford to get a brand spankin new Macbook!

Ok so let me start off by saying I do not know much about computers especially terms and stuff but I am very persistant and mark my words I will fix this thing!!!!

I bought it off of Craigslist.com last night for $270!!!! it came with the box, cables software, everything basically brand new... (looking later I see that the serial # on the comp and the box are one number off! i'm guessing thats bad?) I'm really hoping this guy just didn't know what he was doing and its an easy fix or that I may have done something to mess it up, and again its still an easy fix?

I booted it up when he got there and it started great! I thn took it over to my sisters house because she had a copy of tiger and we wanted to install it (i'm thinking this may be where the problem took place) we tryed to install it doing an "erase and install" but eventually it just said unable to install... I took it home and tried to boot it up and got what is called a "kernel panic" i guess. I tried to reinstall a few times with the same message as before but finally got it to work... I'm using the computer as we speak! but when I tried to install the updates 4 of them would not install including one called osx update. and also many websites do not work because I need a newer version of things. My question is how do I go about getting my computer to update as well as getting all of my applications and stuff up to date, I also want to make sure that this kernal panic thing doesn't happen again. Are there any test I can do to figure out what exactly is or isn't wrong? I am being optimistic because I really want to beilive I got a great deal but in reality I had my Ibook g4 for 4 years and never once got a kernel panic message! also why couldn't I install Tiger? I know this post may sound dumb but I just want to get this thing running the best it possibly can!!!

I do not know the "specs" of the computer but according to the guy it is just your standard Ibook g4
the discs i used to install osx again say
Mac os version 10.3.2
cd version 1.0
2z6914856A

Thanks for reading!
Missy