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10.3 or 10.4 on G3 500MHz ibook??

A

aussiemac86

macrumors 6502
Original poster
I am about to receive a 500MHz G3 ibook (dual USB), I will be using it purely as a study machine. I will be using web browsers, mail and M$ office for 99% of the time (all my other stuff i will do on G5 at home). So I just want the fastest most stable configuration for these basic tasks.

So what do people think 10.4 or 10.3?

it has 384mb ram and a 15 GB hard drive.

Also any suggestions for cutting down on the install size of the OS would be great.

Cheers
 
I personally think 384 MB is little enough that Panther would be a better bet than Tiger. My experience is that Tiger's new features seem to eat up 128 MB or so of RAM incidentally, above and beyond Panther, so that I cannot do as many things simultaneously on the amount of RAM I have (640) as I could on Panther. Also Tiger seems to really get impaired by having low free disk space, more so than Panther. Other than that, I really like Tiger. Dashboard gets a fair amount of use, and I adore spotlight to no end. But, I think you would not be super happy with 384 MB.
 
mkrishnan said:
I personally think 384 MB is little enough that Panther would be a better bet than Tiger. My experience is that Tiger's new features seem to eat up 128 MB or so of RAM incidentally, above and beyond Panther, so that I cannot do as many things simultaneously on the amount of RAM I have (640) as I could on Panther. Also Tiger seems to really get impaired by having low free disk space, more so than Panther. Other than that, I really like Tiger. Dashboard gets a fair amount of use, and I adore spotlight to no end. But, I think you would not be super happy with 384 MB.
Click to expand...

Also, I'm not sure, but the dual USB doesn't firewire does it?

If you don't have firewire, then Tiger won't install out of the box without some work. That being said, with the limited memory, I wouldn't go Tiger. Panther will do everything you need.
 
MacTurtle said:
Also, I'm not sure, but the dual USB doesn't firewire does it?

If you don't have firewire, then Tiger won't install out of the box without some work. That being said, with the limited memory, I wouldn't go Tiger. Panther will do everything you need.
Click to expand...


Yeh i m pretty sure it does have firewire, so tiger installation from my G5 shouldnt be a major hassel, but i think you are both right panther sounds like the best option.
 
I have the same machine with 384 MB Ram and 15 GB HD, dual USB, and Firewire....

I have Panther installed and it is quite snappy. I recently bought it and was very satisfied with Panther installed. I wouldn't bother installing Tiger because you'll have to spend money for more RAM when it won't get you anything extra based on what you want to do.

It is still a great notebook with panther!

You can always try it out with Panther, if you are not satisfied then go for Tiger.
 
To cut down install size,

when you get to the customize screen you can choose to not install the following:

BSD subsystem (additional command line utilities)
Additional application (internte explorer, iApps...)
Printer Drivers (Epson, Canon, lexmark, ...)
Additional speech voices
Fonts
Language translations
X11

If you left out all of those, you can save about 1.5 GB of hard disk space.

Best of luck.
 
I have an iBook 500 with 384MB of RAM, and I've left it on Panther. I don't think that Tiger would run all that well on the system (although I haven't tried), considering the minimum specs required are a little too close for comfort. Also, at this point, 10.3.9 has fewer issues than 10.4.2, so you will be getting a smaller, more stable system.
 
I just got the same machine,,(guess that ebay guy does a pretty good business LOL)


yes it has firewire,,
and yes, I did get and upgrade to tiger and I'm glad I did..
I also have
MS Office with all recent updates
Photoshop Elements 3
BBedit
CSSedit
Adobe Acrobat Pro 7

no problems found...
(also, a recent switch form Win XP.. don't know why I waited so long)
 
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