Upgrade PowerMac G3 to OS X.1

B

berghell

Registered
Hi,

I'm thinking of upgrading a 3 year old PowerMac G3, 350 MHZ with 128 MB RAM and OS 9.1. It's running incredibly slow and I wondered if upgrading to OS 10.1 makes sense. I would normally reformat the hard drive and then install the system afterwards. Any idea's as to whether this is worth on this old machine and whether performance would be even slower. Also even though I have used Norton Utilities to defragment the hard drive performance with IE 5.0 and other Microsoft programs seems very slow.

Any advise would be greatly appreciated. If the recommendation is to go ahead and upgrade - any tips would be appreciated also.

Bob
 
Yes, I think 10.1 on it maybe would be faster because your slow performance may be problems with the system (too many extensions, bad extensions etc.). First you could try to install a clean install of 9.1 again, check the "Perform clean install" box in options in the installer, and check if it works better then. If not, try to install 10.1.
 
10.1 will NOT run as fast as a CLEAN 9.1 will on your G3. However, it will run acceptably, in my opininon. You can't stick with OS 9 forever.

If you are reformatting anyway, so you can always go back.

You'll also find that having only 128 MB RAM will cause 10.1 to behave much slower than, say, 512MB.
 
Guys,

Thanks for the tips. I first got rid of a bunch of extraneous extensions that I guess built up over time. This alone sped things up considerably. I will also get 512 MB of RAM before I upgrade to OS 10.1. Will let you know how it performs.

Bob
 
I run X.1 nearly full time on my G3 350. It runs quite well--much better than 10.0.4. I got a 512MB RAM upgrade (2 256 chips) for about $50 about a month ago.

-JARinteractive
 
Yeah, 10.x is more RAM intensice than most think. I have an iBook SE maxed out at 320MB and it is not enough.

Just take a look at the top command to see how much memory you are hogging. Vm is now an integral part of the system, but the more RAM the better. I find in other machine after you hit the 512 or more mark you can run comfortambly with many apps.
 
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