Just installed Leopard on my 1.42Ghz Power PC Mac Mini

[Ninja Dom]

Hi guys, so one of my Christmas presents was a nice shiny new copy of Leopard from the Apple Store. It is actually a new 10.5.1 version disk too.

I was currently running Tiger 10.4.11 on my Mac Mini 1.42 GHz (Power PC) with 1Gb RAM and I believed that it ran extremely sweet. Tiger ran so sweet I was quite hesitant in upgrading to Leopard.

I upgraded to Leopard using the Archive & Install option and the whole installation process was very smooth. I had no initial hang-ups, freezes or error messages during the install and the whole installation took about 90 mins.

After everything installed I was ready to go and I experienced a huge lock up with the system. Nothing worked, had to pull the power cord out of the Mac Mini before restarting. Apart from that, I've had no other major problems whatsoever.

On the whole though, Leopard does not run as smooth as Tiger did. Expose is jerky, Safari uses a whole amount of memory up in System Processes and I seem to be having a huge amount of Page Outs. I get more beach balls than ever but the OS is still very useable. Quick Look takes a long time to load movie files, its quicker to fire up VLC to preview the movies rather than wait for Cover Flow/Quick Look.

So I'm a touch disappointed with the performance of Leopard so far. 10.4.11 was wonderful and swift, Leopard (with security updates) is definitely slower by comparison.

What are your opinions with Leopard on Power PC Mac's??

 

[ravenvii]

Upgrading your RAM will fix almost all of your problems with Leopard.

But overall, yeah, Tiger is much less demanding on the machine than Leopard.

RAM is the key. Up that to 2 GB and you will see vast speed improvements on QuickLook and the like.

Upgrading RAM on the Mac mini is no mean task, so it's up to you.

 

[Ninja Dom]

I've got one of the first Mac Mini's so I think I can only upgrade to 1Gb Max (please correct). I already did that (putty knife style) as the machine came with 512Mb in as standard.

I also notice the fan of the Mac Mini running louder than when running Tiger.

 

[sbornia]

I've got one of the first Mac Mini's so I think I can only upgrade to 1Gb Max (please correct).

Thanks for posting your report. I have the same machine, which does in fact take 1GB RAM max. Based on your experience, I'm going to stick with 10.4.11 for a while...I already get enough spinning beach balls when running Office apps, PS, DW, and 10+ open browser windows at the same time.

 

[CalMin]

Like you, I was a bit underwhelmed when I put Leopard on my Powerbook G4 1ghz. A very quick fix for the choppy gfx was to turn off the 3D dock - that returned expose and dashboard to Tiger like smoothness. Also, make sure you stuff the mini full of as much RAM as it will take too I have 1.25GB and it runs nicely.

Overall i was pleased with the update and I am sure given time that you will be too.

Type this into terminal to kill the 3D dock

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES

Then You’ll need to kill and restart the dock using the following command,

killall Dock

Simply replace the YES with NO to and repeat the command to undo the change it back to 3D.

 

[Dustman]

I've got one of the first Mac Mini's so I think I can only upgrade to 1Gb Max (please correct). I already did that (putty knife style) as the machine came with 512Mb in as standard.

I also notice the fan of the Mac Mini running louder than when running Tiger.

Apple likes to play us all off as chumps sometimes and will tell you that you can only put a GB of ram into it. ..Its a lie though and it'll max out at 2 GB.

 

[ronainsworth68]

I have the same macmini, with only 512MB of ram. I upgraded it to leopard when it was first released and so far I haven’t had any lock ups. Ill be honest with you though, I don’t use the QuickLook are any of the higher end gui aspects. I just use it as a media machine for the living room TV, from shared iTunes and iPhoto libraries throughout the house. Ill give it a try when I get home and see what happens.

 

[heatmiser]

I was currently running Tiger 10.4.11 on my Mac Mini 1.42 GHz (Power PC) with 1Gb RAM and I believed that it ran extremely sweet. Tiger ran so sweet I was quite hesitant in upgrading to Leopard.

It's never a good idea to fix what doesn't need fixing. Resist the hype. Stick with Tiger if you don't need Leopard...

 

[Consultant]

With older machines near the minimum requirement, at this time, 10.4 will work better, unless you need time machine.

 

[gkarris]

I upgraded my 1GHz iBook G4 with 768 Megs RAM to Leopard. I had minor problems with 10.5, but upgrading to 10.5.1 the problems all went away.

Maybe try removing some of the programs you are no longer using or older programs that are running but only 10.4 compatible...

 

[Ninja Dom]

I run Mail.app, Safari, Quicktime & VLC, iTunes and iPhoto almost all the time. I've also started using iChat as that can now connect to Google Talk accounts.

My memory usage has gone through the roof. According to iStat Pro I've had 113,000 Page Outs after just over 2 days of uptime. More memory in the machine would fix this but I'm sure my specific Mac Mini max's out at 1Gb.

 

[weckart]

My memory usage has gone through the roof. According to iStat Pro I've had 113,000 Page Outs after just over 2 days of uptime. More memory in the machine would fix this but I'm sure my specific Mac Mini max's out at 1Gb.

I have the same mini as does my brother. I think the 1GB max came from the fact that 2GB sticks were probably not available at the time that mini was launched. I doubt that there is anything in the firmware preventing 2GB from being recognised.

 

[Frisco]

1024MB or 1 GB is all the original (G4) Mac mini can handle.

 

[madmaxmedia]

I have a 1.33 GHz eMac with 1.25 GB RAM, and I also notice Leopard is a bit slower/choppier than Tiger. It's not horrible, just wish I had equal performance as before. I guess we all got spoiled by previous upgrades that always improved performance.

This eMac is due for an upgrade in the next year or so anyway...My MacBook runs great with Leopard and it's just a CD 1.83 GHz model.

 

[Techguy172]

Yeah, Leopard is kind of a memory pig it likes ram a lot mine is slow because of it.

 

[mcavjame]

What are your opinions with Leopard on Power PC Mac's??

I have installed 10.5 on my 3 year old iMac and I don't notice any performance issues yet. I couldn't do an archive install because there was some kind of error on the hard drive that the OS could not repair. I ended up moving my home folder to a backup drive, formatting the iMac drive and doing a clean install. This is probably a better path anyway. I have only installed non rosetta apps so far and I am waiting for my new version of CS3. It should be interesting to see how it runs on this old machine.

I did a quick search on the RAM question as I was curious because we have the same 1.42 GHz mini in our house. Tech specs and memory sellers all specify 1 GB as the max. If anyone tries the 2 GB and gets it working, I would be very interested to know.