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10.5 on PPC Mac-Mini, 512mb???

O

ocbo41

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 8, 2007
244
0
My grandma has a PPC 1.25ghz G4 Mini with 512mb of ram....will the upgrade slow her down to a crawl? The most intensive it will be used will be cropping pictures, but prob. just organize them and slideshow :)

The features I liked where the time machine and cover flow might be easier to grasp for her (she's clueless on a windows box)
 
She's your grandma. Upgrade her to at least 1GB of RAM with Leopard.
 
I'm having problems running my imac with 1GB. See if you can stick at least 1.5GB in there. That should hold her off for a while.
 
Alright thanks guys! ...I didn't want it to end up like my dads eMac with 256mb of ram from the factory...yuck :) 1GB works well on his....though whys DDR 333 got to be so much more expensive than DDR2?? lol

Thanks
 
My 1.5ghz mac mini g4 runs fine on Leopard with the maximum 1 gig of ram. However, I had Onyx disable Dashboard while still in Tiger as it seemed to slow things down. Still disabled in Leopard upgrade. Sell the 512 stick and get Grandma a 1gig stick. Also upgrade the hard drive to 7200 rpm while you have the box open; you will see some speed improvement.
 
Right now....

...I'm typing this at uni on my 1.42Ghz G4 PPC mac-mini 512Mb. Yesterday I upgraded it to leopard (cheap updates from school). I did an upgrade install. 1st impressions...? It does take longer to boot. A minute or two I guess (yet to time it), but certainly longer than Tiger.

Day to day usage? No problems really. Word/Excel take longer to open but seem smooth enough when being used. Mail and Safari are ok, open slightly slower than on Tiger, but when open run fine.

Switching between spaces/animations etc? There is a slight delay, maybe a second or so moving between spaces (I currently have 3 spaces, email/ical, safari, M$ stuff), it's noticeable, but not annoying (yet). Quick view takes a second or so to open but is still quicker than opening a full application.

That said this is only a preliminary investigation, and I'm yet to really tax the system (e.g. huuuuge thesis Word docs containing pictures) but I think it is certainly a useably system. I am happy with it (but not as happy as I will be when I finally upgrade the MacBook at home).

Hope this helps!
 
At least you aren't trying to find PC-133 for the Leopard upgrade, now that was a PIA to even find a single 512MB dimm in stock locally. :p
 
Muncher said:
But seriously, you'd better have a fast hard drive if you plan to do anything strenuous on that mac.
Click to expand...

Yea the sad part is the most strenuous app she use's is 3D solitaire....the machine is more than sufficient as is...will upgrade the ram to a gig if I go with leopard though.
 
capoeirista said:
Switching between spaces/animations etc? There is a slight delay, maybe a second or so moving between spaces (I currently have 3 spaces, email/ical, safari, M$ stuff), it's noticeable, but not annoying (yet). Quick view takes a second or so to open but is still quicker than opening a full application.
Click to expand...

As long as the pageouts occur when swapping apps, there isn't a huge performance issue for the applications.

So even if you are getting pageouts, its not really a major deal.

It's when it happens within the application you are using that you know you need a memory upgrade badly.
 
adamzx3 said:
My grandma has a PPC 1.25ghz G4 Mini with 512mb of ram....will the upgrade slow her down to a crawl? The most intensive it will be used will be cropping pictures, but prob. just organize them and slideshow :)

The features I liked where the time machine and cover flow might be easier to grasp for her (she's clueless on a windows box)
Click to expand...

10.5.1 sped up a lot of G4's - try it, if not, upgrade. My iBook G4 with 768 runs great on it...
 
A friend is running Leopard on a ppc Mac Mini. He says it's running fine but he cant decide if it's slightly slower or slightly faster than Tiger ... :eek:
 
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