iMac G4 upgrade - Tiger or Leopard?

M

marco75

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The local U3A has received an iMac G4 (800 MHz, GeForce2MX) sporting the table lamp design. It has MacOS 10.3.9 installed, which is incompatible with a lot of software. 10.4 seems to be a transition point for OSX software -- like .dmg's not mounting under 10.3.9 because the compression format was changed.

Now, which OS should I upgrade to? MacOS 10.4 Tiger or 10.5.6 Leopard?

I'm thinking that Tiger might be more responsive than Leopard on the 800 MHz CPU.

Thanks for reading.
 
The bottom limit for CPU in Leopard is a G4 867 MHz, so Leopard won't install (without either using a trick to accept a slow CPU - or transferring as a complete image).
You also would want to make sure the RAM is maxxed out to 1 GB, still not a lot for Leopard.
I would recommend staying with Tiger for that model, although you will still struggle with a lot of software. But, it will be a lot better than Panther...
 
Thanks for your advice! I will upgrade it to Tiger. At least it will be compatible with more of the software on the internet, and .dmg's with bzip compression will mount. I will go with a clean install, as there is no valuable data on the machine.
 
I'ld go with 10.5 Leopard ::angel::

I've seen 500MHz PowerBooks successfully running that :)

And I've personally got one of those lamp design iMacs that have too low specs, which I've successfully upgraded to 10.5 Leopard. I did it by mounting it in FireWire Target Mode on another computer and then just installing on the lamp design iMac as if it was an external harddisk. Both the procedure and the iMac works perfectly, and this method is the simplest and easiest one.
 
I just updated the G4 "Lamp" to 10.4 and didn't yet have time to experiment further with installing apps. It seems to be about as responsive as before. It only has 256 MB RAM, as well. I have a lot of old RAM at home, I wonder if any of it would be compatible...?

Amazed how easy the update process was, though, all I had to do was insert the DVD, double click one fat icon and follow the prompts. I went with update instead of re-install.
 
256 MB is the minimum for 10.4
Any RAM memory that you add will help with performance and stability...
Your G4 iMac is a challenge to add RAM memory. There's two slots, and each slot takes a different type of memory chip.
Remove the bottom metal cover (4 tiny screws, which you simply loosen.), and you get to the user-accessible memory slot, which takes a SODIMM (laptop memory), PC133, maximum of 512MB on that chip. Getting to the other memory slot requires removing the T15 torx cap screws, which you can see when the bottom cover is removed. That will allow the bottom case to be opened, where you will find the other memory slot, for a PC133 SDRAM chip (most would call that a desktop memory chip, physically much larger), also a maximum of 512MB. If you upgrade both, then you have the maximum possible of 1GB of RAM.
Just in case you ask, there's another slot under the metal bottom cover. It's for an Apple Airport (wireless) card, and the wire that you should see near that slot is to connect the wireless antenna to the card, in the event that you want to add one of those.
 
Very informative, thank you Delta!

Since the Mac in question doesn't belong to me, I probably won't spend money upgrading it. It belongs to a local non-profit university, and hasn't been used by any of the clients yet. I find it fun to play around with, it's so different from the WinPCs I'm used to. :)
 
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