Just rebuilt a iBook g4 1.2 ghz

[g4 powerbookboy]

Good morning all,

I just rebuilt a iBook 1.2 ghz with 768 mb of ram, wondering if it is a good idea to install leopard on it or keep tiger. planning on putting in a 1 gb ram chip soon to max out the ram at 1.25gb. it runs tiger quite well as it is, but leopard is more recent and may still get security updates. just do not want to make a brick out of it since it is a much better laptop than any windows laptop.

[Zotaccian]

Tiger and Leopard are unsupported so it is unlikely there will be more security updates for them.

Tiger is faster so if speed is your concern I would stay in Tiger.

[eyoungren]

With 768mb of ram it might be best to stick with Tiger. But after you add the 1GB stick my vote would be for Leopard.

For some reason Leopard has a bad rap for being slow. But with max ram and a clean system it's a good OS.

[cocacolakid]

Max out the RAM and put Leopard on it.

[g4 powerbookboy]

I am supposed to see my buddy at the Apple store near me at 3 pm, since I lost the leopard disk, he told me last night that they will install it via firewire. Then need to see if I have a 1gb ram stick or need to pick one up from either best buy or craigslist, unless my dead dell has the same kind of ram. should be interesting to see the end result. Apple products are really the best, and have no intention of ever going back to a winblows pc.

[cocacolakid]

Originally Posted by g4 powerbookboy

I am supposed to see my buddy at the Apple store near me at 3 pm, since I lost the leopard disk, he told me last night that they will install it via firewire. Then need to see if I have a 1gb ram stick or need to pick one up from either best buy or craigslist, unless my dead dell has the same kind of ram. should be interesting to see the end result. Apple products are really the best, and have no intention of ever going back to a winblows pc.

Great. Just be aware that until you get the extra RAM that Leopard will likely feel slower than Tiger did. But more RAM will fix that. It probably won't feel faster than Tiger with more RAM but will run fine, and the added features and compatibility of more software make it far more usable than Tiger (not that there's anything wrong with Tiger, it's just that if a Mac can run Leopard it generally should have Leopard).

[Zotaccian]

In my experience the difference is not huge but can be noticed, for example with first revision of G5 iMacs the dock animations lag while in Tiger everything is smooth. Also if you look what the system requirements are for both operating systems it is quite obvious that Tiger does not need much.

I still tend to install Leopard just because it's newer even though I think it takes more resources, when I had PowerMac G4 733Mhz (digital audio) overclock to 867Mhz with 512MB I still installed Leopard even though the machine just barely met the system requirements, I had flashed Radeon 8500 64MB as video card

[g4 powerbookboy]

sounds good to me, I'm trying to remember if I had an ibook with leopard, i think i did and it only had 512 of ram and worked ok.

[Jessica Lares]

Originally Posted by g4 powerbookboy

sounds good to me, I'm trying to remember if I had an ibook with leopard, i think i did and it only had 512 of ram and worked ok.

Yeah, I was about to mention this. I only have 512MB in my Power Mac G5 and it works great.

[g4 powerbookboy]

looks like i know what i will be doing later this afternoon... playing with all the new toys while the ibook gets leopard installed via firewire at the apple store

[cyberghoser1]

I still have my iBook G4 with 800MHz G4, with maxed ram at 1.12gb, Leopard runs fine on it. Those lappys never die if you treat them well.

[skateny]

Originally Posted by cocacolakid

Great. Just be aware that until you get the extra RAM that Leopard will likely feel slower than Tiger did. But more RAM will fix that. It probably won't feel faster than Tiger with more RAM but will run fine, and the added features and compatibility of more software make it far more usable than Tiger (not that there's anything wrong with Tiger, it's just that if a Mac can run Leopard it generally should have Leopard).

What he said.

My iBook came with 768MB and Leopard installed. It worked fine. I always max out RAM, and when I did, it worked even better. A 1GB stick was $21.99. from a trusted seller.

[seveej]

Considering the prices of memory nowadays, I always recommend going for max RAM (caveat: unless the difference is negligible or installation is a major pain. )

Then again, I generally find Tiger very satisfactory for G4 gear (maxed out or not).

My rule of thumb is that 10.4 is for G4, 10.5 is for G5 and 10.6 is for intel ( unless you specifically need a feature enabled in a later OS or similar exigencies exist).

RGDS,

[blesscheese]

I just put Tiger and Leopard onto separate partitions on my 1.4 GHz iBook G4, with 512MB RAM, and both run really well. Given I have a MBA with Snow Leopard and a Mini with SL on it as well, I'll keep Leopard on the thing, and get rid of the Tiger partition. I can't think of anything I want to run in Classic.

Given that you already have 768MB of RAM in the thing, you may want to save the $30 and skip a ram upgrade. You likely have the 256MB soldered on the motherboard, which means you will have to take out the 512MB chip, and put in a 1GB chip to just get the memory up to 1.25. It may not be worth it, even if you want to hot-rod it!

[g4 powerbookboy]

Finally made it to the apple store to get leopard installed on my iBook. doing its updates now. still seems to work good with 10.5.6, updating it to 10.5.8 now. internet connection at home is sucky again tonight... comcast is crap if people are using internet.

[Lil Chillbil]

Congrats on the rebuild

[CIA]

As an owner of the exact same machine, I say if the memory is cheap, (Or if you don't care about $$) drop the 1GB chip in it. I have 1.25 in mine and it runs leopard fine. It's more a mess-around laptop for me now, but it's still fine for most things. Video is studdery, but for general web surfing it works fine. Look into iScroll2 for two finger scrolling on that machine, it makes life a lot better.
I stuck a larger HD in mine also but man was that a huge PITA. In a pinch I can still edit FCP 5 on it!

[g4 powerbookboy]

comcast really sucks especially at night, took forever to download and install the 10.5.8 and safari 5 updates.... finished around 3 am. testing the system now and it seems to work awesome. a friend of mine just called and told me he may have a 1gb ram chip for me from his old laptop that died. may see him later this afternoon but need to think about sleep soon. glad putting leopard on it didn't make it a brick!!

[blesscheese]

Originally Posted by g4 powerbookboy

comcast really sucks especially at night, took forever to download and install the 10.5.8 and safari 5 updates.... finished around 3 am. testing the system now and it seems to work awesome. a friend of mine just called and told me he may have a 1gb ram chip for me from his old laptop that died. may see him later this afternoon but need to think about sleep soon. glad putting leopard on it didn't make it a brick!!

Well, if the RAM is free, then the price is right, I'd say.

FYI, if I were you, I'd save those updates and burn them to a DVD, so you don't have to go through that download again. You never know when you might want to change your drive set up again...

[PowerPCMacMan]

Not true.. Leopard flies on the Mirror Drive Door Dual 1.25 with 2MB L3 Cache and Dual 1.42 2MB L3 Cache based G4 PowerMacs. The L3 cache compensates for the slower front side bus of 167mhz. Couple that with 2GB of DDR memory and Leopard flies.

The same can be said for the 1.67ghz G4 PowerBooks. Mine is a dual-layer G4 PowerBook 1.67 and Leopard flies on this thing also.. One thing I can recommend is use xslimmer or Monolingual to remove ALL Intel binaries from applications all the way down to the SYSTEM CORE files!

Leopard would then be a pure PowerPC OS and without the bloat of Intel's binaries in it this will fly on any system.

I would not recommend running Leopard on a sawtooth, gigabit ethernet, digital audio, or early Quicksilver, or the 1st 867mhz MDD.. UNLESS you have an upgrade processor. Base system specs will make Leopard run extremely slow.


My rule of thumb is that 10.4 is for G4, 10.5 is for G5 and 10.6 is for intel ( unless you specifically need a feature enabled in a later OS or similar exigencies exist).

RGDS,[/QUOTE]

[skateny]

Originally Posted by PowerPCMacMan

My rule of thumb is that 10.4 is for G4, 10.5 is for G5 and 10.6 is for intel ( unless you specifically need a feature enabled in a later OS or similar exigencies exist).

RGDS,

[/QUOTE]

Never had a problem with Leopard on my iBook.

[g4 powerbookboy]

my g4 ibook works really nice with the leopard install. only time it is slow is when it is connected to a crappy internet connection, otherwise it is quite quick

[PowerPCMacMan]

Originally Posted by seveej

Considering the prices of memory nowadays, I always recommend going for max RAM (caveat: unless the difference is negligible or installation is a major pain. )

Then again, I generally find Tiger very satisfactory for G4 gear (maxed out or not).

My rule of thumb is that 10.4 is for G4, 10.5 is for G5 and 10.6 is for intel ( unless you specifically need a feature enabled in a later OS or similar exigencies exist).

RGDS,

I know Skateny, I was just quoting what Seveij was saying.. which we know he is wrong, right? Of course an iBook G4 will run Leopard nicely!


Never had a problem with Leopard on my iBook.[/QUOTE]

[Lil Chillbil]

Originally Posted by g4 powerbookboy

comcast really sucks especially at night, took forever to download and install the 10.5.8 and safari 5 updates.... finished around 3 am. testing the system now and it seems to work awesome. a friend of mine just called and told me he may have a 1gb ram chip for me from his old laptop that died. may see him later this afternoon but need to think about sleep soon. glad putting leopard on it didn't make it a brick!!

I have comcast and It runs great no matter what time of day it is

[tom vilsack]

Originally Posted by g4 powerbookboy

I just rebuilt a iBook 1.2 ghz with 768 mb of ram.

-what steps did you do to rebuild ibook?