OS X 10.3 on a g4 400mhz PB??

[andypress]

I'm looking to buy an older 400mhz G4 powerbook, and I was wondering how 10.3 would run on a laptop of this speed with at least 384mb of ram. Will it be slow, or would I not notice mcuh of a slow down? Also, I'm wondering how full screen divx & xvid playback will be. Thanks.

[Flowbee]

I'm running 10.3 on a Pismo (firewire) G3/400 Powerbook and it actually runs quite well. I would recommend at least 512mb RAM and upgrading to a 5400rpm hard drive for best performance.

Full screen video isn't a problem. I might get a stutter once in a while, but it mostly runs nice and smooth.

I love my Pismo, but at this point you might want to also take a look at a refurb G4 iBook, which will certainly last you longer than the G3. If you can handle the price difference, it's probably a much better value.

[blue&whiteman]

vlc and mplayer are altivec optimized so any G4 cpu will play stutter free video. also, osx is altivec optimized as well. go for it.

[longofest]

10.3 will run fine on that config, although you might want to bump the RAM up to 512MB.