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Best OS for iMac G4 / 800

kirkbross

kirkbross

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
I just bought an iMac G4 / 800 for my girlfriend and I'm wondering what OS I should install. It has 10.2... should I just leave it alone or try to install Panther or Tiger?
 
My iMac G4 runs Panther (10.3.9) just fine.

Take into cosideration my machine has 1GB of RAM also.
 
Wait for Leopard and try it. It should work fine - better than 10.2, anyway. But if not you can sell it on and get Tiger, which should work well. I use it on my G4 with 512MB of RAM and have no problems.
 
...awesome, thanks all...

Panther or Leopard...hmmm... does that mean I should NOT install Tiger for some reason? I just bought a copy for my dual 867 but I'm going to buy a Clovertown Mac Pro if and when they arrive (in fifty years) so I have a copy of Tiger sitting around...
 
kirkbross said:
...awesome, thanks all...

Panther or Leopard...hmmm... does that mean I should NOT install Tiger for some reason? I just bought a copy for my dual 867 but I'm going to buy a Clovertown Mac Pro if and when they arrive (in fifty years) so I have a copy of Tiger sitting around...
Click to expand...

Tiger will be better than Panther on that hardware. Pretty much the only reason *NOT* to install Tiger over Panther is if you only have 128 MB of RAM. And if you only have 128, I'd heavily recommend getting more memory before doing *ANYTHING* with the OS.

OS X is the only major OS that gets faster on the same hardware with each new release. (On my G4/500 with 512 MB RAM, Tiger is faster than Panther; Panther is faster than Jaguar; Jaguar is faster than Puma (10.1,) and Puma is faster than Cheetah (10.0.)) But, OS 9 will almost guaranteed be faster than OS X on any hardware that can run OS 9. Of course, OS 9 will be nearly unusable on the web today, due to there only being one currently-maintained web browser (iCab.)

At this point, I recommend running the latest version of OS X that the hardware supports for everyone that can use OS X. If you have a significant number of OS 9-only apps, then I recommend using 9.2.2.
 
I have a 700 mhz imac g4 that runs fine on Tiger. Performance went up a little from Panther, definitely not a slow down. I do have 1 gb of memory also, might be a good idea for you too.
 
Ehhhhgselent... thanks.

Yeah, I'm going to pick up another 256Mb SO-DIMM so it'll have 512MB... maybe more if I can find a 512 cheap enough... any leads on Mac memory sites besides Macsales and Macsolutions?
 
ehurtley said:
OS X is the only major OS that gets faster on the same hardware with each new release.
Click to expand...

No, you have that not quite right You should say "All OSes except those from Microsoft, get faster on the same hardware with each new release." Mac OS X is not alone in this. Solaris, Linux and BSD keep improving too. All of them tend to require more RAM over time
 
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