I have received a 1Ghz eMac with 1GB of RAM, running 10.5. It seems sluggish: windows open slowly, Youtube vids play unevenly. My old 667 tibook running 10.4 is a lot smoother. Is 10.5 too much for this machine? Should I install a lesser OS? Thanks.
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Best OS for 1GHz eMac?
- Thread starter 8thMan
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I would definitely downgrade to 10.4.x, especially with only 1GB of RAM. Leopard's a little too demanding for that. If you can bump the RAM cheaply, it may be worth it. But even then, I doubt you'd see huge improvement.
Heh. I'm running Leopard on a machine with 1.25 Ghz and 1.25 GB of ram and it's not quite as fast as the macs I use at the Apple Store, but it's not much slower. I'm quite pleased with it. I'd try a fresh install of Tiger, that should work swimmingly.
I have 10.5.X on my 1.25Ghz eMac. When I first got it I put Leopard on it, and then bumped back to 10.4 because the difference was significant enough for me warrant the downgrade. Then I upgraded it to 1GB of Ram an reinstalled Leopard. It worked well enough for my daughter just going to Disney channel and ePets. I didn't notice it being overly slow for her. Significantly better than the G4 800 she had, but 10.4 was surely smoother. Then I found out you could actually put 2GB of Ram in the eMac. So I installed that and replaced the hard drive w/ a 7200 RPM drive and now it's quite nice. Not for the faint of heart, but fun for me. I can see her using this already nearly 5 year old machine for another 2 years unless it were to fail.
Agreement with other posts on this - Tiger is probably the most you want to put on the eMac 1 GHz. You are however limited to 1 Gb RAM maximum in that model (ref: Mactracker), which is a strong argument in my book for stopping at Tiger.
