i'll be getting a free Mac Mini from someone and i'm not sure of the version of OS X on it. As far as I can tell it has a G4 CPU in there. if it's Tiger then i wanted to buy a copy of Leopard. Will Apple still sell a copy or is fleabay my only path?
i'll be getting a free Mac Mini from someone and i'm not sure of the version of OS X on it. As far as I can tell it has a G4 CPU in there. if it's Tiger then i wanted to buy a copy of Leopard. Will Apple still sell a copy or is fleabay my only path?
My sister has the fastest G4 Mini that was running Tiger. Her son installed Leopard on it, and it now runs so much slower, and she is not happy with it. She does not have the Tiger DVD Installation disc. Her son in CA gave her the Mini when he upgraded to an Intel Mini and a Macbook Pro. She lives in the Midwest and would not know how to install an OS even if she had the disc. I can't help her since I live 1700 miles away.i'll be getting a free Mac Mini from someone and i'm not sure of the version of OS X on it. As far as I can tell it has a G4 CPU in there. if it's Tiger then i wanted to buy a copy of Leopard. Will Apple still sell a copy or is fleabay my only path?
You will still find it on Amazon, eBay and plenty of others place. Probably even in Apple's online store - after all, there are generations of Macs out there that cannot run Snow Leopard.
However, believe me, you do NOT want to install Leopard on a G4 Mac Mini. In my experience, you need at least 2 GB of RAM and one of the fastest G4's (1.67 GHz) to run Leopard at acceptable speed. The G4 Mac Mini is limited to a maximum of 1 GB RAM and, in best case to a 1.5 GHz CPU (Silent Upgrade). Most G4 Minis either have a 1.25 or a 1.42 GHz CPU.
I've tried it on a couple of G4's, and only my 17" PowerBook ran Leopard well enough. I reverted the 12" PowerBook G4 with 768 MB RAM and a 17" iMac G4 with 1 GB RAM in our house back to Tiger. Leopard -crawled- on that iMac.
But talking about Tiger: The first generation of Mac Minis was still sold with Panther. So don't be surprised if you don't even have Tiger on that computer.
But isn't it also true that a G4 must have an Intel processor in order to run Leopard?
Hmm. I have Leopard on two G4 machines; one an iBook 1.33GHz, one a Mac Mini 1.5GHz, both with 1GB RAM. I honesty don't have a problem with either, though they do get light use (the iBook mainly for web, email, word processing and Keynote; the Mini running headless as an server for Squeezebox, iTunes and iPhoto).