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G4 iBook Setup

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biblicalfury

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 31, 2007
56
0
I just brought my 8+ year old G4 iBook (my first Mac) back to life by putting a fresh install of 10.4 on it. It had become so sluggish before that it sat unused for years. It's working surprisingly well now and should work nicely to fill in the void that my iMac and iPad don't quite fill.

So, my question is what programs will give me the best performance? I think part of the problem before was installing programs that were a bit to advanced for the machine, which really hurt performance. I'm just looking to do web browsing, typing, spreadsheets, maybe a bit of iTunes, and DVD viewing. I've tried tenfourfox, but just have the stock programming at the moment. I may have old versions of iLife and iWork that are compatible.

I think it is 800 MHz and has 640mb RAM.

Thanks for the help!
 
T

tayloralmond

macrumors 6502
Mar 26, 2009
446
9
Michigan, USA
Here's my recommendations:

Web Browsing: TenFourFox and Camino

Office: Microsoft Office X (this was the first release for OS X and runs really fast on earlier PowerPC's)

iTunes: Your iBook will run the latest iTunes, but it will run horribly. Unless you need all the features of the current release, you should look into iTunes 8.2.1 (this was the last release for G3's and runs fast on G4's) Link: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL857

iLife: I'd install iLife '04 (if you have it)

iWork: I'd install iWork '05 (if you have it)

Videos: VLC 0.9.10 (Link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vlc...d0-939f-11e1-9339-00219b8a879e-6&source=accel) and MPlayer (Link: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/rp9codecs-macosx-20041107.pkg.zip)


Here's some links to system requirements for iLife/iWork:

iLife: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4411
iWork: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3879

Lastly, max out the RAM by purchasing a 1GB stick of RAM. This will help performance tremendously. Enjoy the PowerPC goodness.
 
Ariii

Ariii

macrumors 6502a
Jan 26, 2012
681
9
Chicago
tayloralmond said:
Here's my recommendations:

Web Browsing: TenFourFox and Camino

Office: Microsoft Office X (this was the first release for OS X and runs really fast on earlier PowerPC's)

iTunes: Your iBook will run the latest iTunes, but it will run horribly. Unless you need all the features of the current release, you should look into iTunes 8.2.1 (this was the last release for G3's and runs fast on G4's) Link: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL857

iLife: I'd install iLife '04 (if you have it)

iWork: I'd install iWork '05 (if you have it)

Videos: VLC 0.9.10 (Link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vlc...d0-939f-11e1-9339-00219b8a879e-6&source=accel) and MPlayer (Link: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/rp9codecs-macosx-20041107.pkg.zip)


Here's some links to system requirements for iLife/iWork:

iLife: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4411
iWork: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3879

Lastly, max out the RAM by purchasing a 1GB stick of RAM. This will help performance tremendously. Enjoy the PowerPC goodness.
Click to expand...


Actually, I would recommend OpenOffice. It runs well on almost any Mac, and it's completely free. I agree with everything else completely.
 
T

tayloralmond

macrumors 6502
Mar 26, 2009
446
9
Michigan, USA
Ariii said:
Actually, I would recommend OpenOffice. It runs well on almost any Mac, and it's completely free. I agree with everything else completely.
Click to expand...

The main reason I don't recommend OpenOffice is because it often causes problems when moving projects back and forth from Office. It works great, but upon placing items into Office, some items will be formatted differently. If one were just using OpenOffice and not moving files back and forth, I'd recommend OpenOffice 100%.
 
B

biblicalfury

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 31, 2007
56
0
I checked my old box of software and I actually have slightly newer software than suggested:

- Office 2004
- iWork 2006
- iLife 2006

I meet the system requirements for each and I'm sure this is what I had on the iBook back in the day. Is it worth installing or would I be better off finding the older versions?

I would probably only use iPhoto and iWeb from iLife and Pages from iWork. Probably just some light document and spreadsheet work with Office.

This is a rather fun project! I'm sending this from the iBook with TenFourFox now while I'm setting up the new (old) iTunes.
 
T

tayloralmond

macrumors 6502
Mar 26, 2009
446
9
Michigan, USA
biblicalfury said:
I checked my old box of software and I actually have slightly newer software than suggested:

- Office 2004
- iWork 2006
- iLife 2006

I meet the system requirements for each and I'm sure this is what I had on the iBook back in the day. Is it worth installing or would I be better off finding the older versions?

I would probably only use iPhoto and iWeb from iLife and Pages from iWork. Probably just some light document and spreadsheet work with Office.

This is a rather fun project! I'm sending this from the iBook with TenFourFox now while I'm setting up the new (old) iTunes.
Click to expand...

Glad everything's coming together for you. Those versions should work just fine. There's no reason to go out and purchase older versions of that software unless you happen to get a really good deal. Also, Office 2004 has ".docx" support so it's actually good to have if you want to be compatible with new Office documents. Also, be sure to do some optimizations:

I've posted some of these recommendations on other threads, but here you go:

1) Disable "window shadows" with the application 'ShadowKiller'
2) Disable Spotlight and the Dashboard with app "TinkerTool"
3) Change color scheme to "thousands of colors." (it's not even noticable on most tasks)
4) Change the minimize effect to "Scaled Effect" instead of "Genie Effect"
5) Disable dock animations.
 
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