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A Question on Upgrading Power Mac G4

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kaiserw0lf

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 11, 2008
5
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I live in the left armpit of America, I mean Tacom
(I hope this is the right section for this, I looked for some questions to see if they were already asked but I didnt have any luck)

Well I just made the switch to PC's to Mac's, or should I say Im trying. I got a cheap old Power Mac G4 (the graphite colored one) but it runs Mac OS 9.2 and I would really like to bring it up to OS X 10.4, which is called Tiger right? Well I have been scouring the web as lurker for the past week in hopes Id find an answer. No luck. Its almost like MS has thwarted my attempts so I had to stay on this PC. Then I came across this forum and it seemed like a good place to ask some questions.

Again, I would just like to know how to update it to a newer OS if its possible. Any help would be a great help to my conversion. i cant wait to grab a new one this summer, but for now the G4 will have to do. Thanks for any and all help.
 
If you have installation disks for tiger just pop in the first disk, restart while holding the 'c' key and run the installer.
If you do not have tiger disks find out if your G4 is supported by leopard and get a copy of it if it does.
 
Assuming you meet the minimum specs RAM-wise, get your hands on a Tiger install DVD or disk image and install it.
 
You may have to buy Mac OS 10.4 "Tiger" on eBay and then use Software Update to automatically bring the OS up to 10.4.11, its most recent version.
 
thanks so much you guys. i guess it would be pretty easy to find, but if anyone could direct me to the system requirements of tiger? Also my friend says he has copies of Tiger on 4 cds (im not sure how he got them, I wont ask.. probably torrented). Will they actually work because sjobs@mac.com said install DVD. I probably sound really stupid, so sorry. Again, you guys rock.
 
Well CD's or DVD's if you have a DVD-ROM, CD's if you have a CD-ROM.

Tiger was available on both CD's and DVD's due to the fact that some G3 iMacs and iBooks only had CD-ROM drives.

Get some RAM. Tiger likes at least 512MB if not more.

Tracer
 
kaiserw0lf said:
Is there a difference between OS Tiger and OS X Tiger or did you just leave out the X? I noticed an x86 version, which is most common when I have searched on the net about it. That is intel chip right? If so, will that work on my older architecture G4?
Click to expand...

OS X Tiger is a version of Mac OS 10 (X) a.k.a 10.4. "Leopard" is 10.5, (I think "Panther" was version 10.3...) but they're all OS X. That's what you want to look for.

Good luck, and welcome! (To OS X, that is...)
 
What spec is your mac? I have a 466mhz Digital Audio powermac and it runs Tiger great although I upgraded the ram. 512mb and more if you can get your hands on it. There are loads of options to upgrade your mac while you save for a newer intel mac.
 
Mine is a 450 mhz, and it came with 256 ram standard but it is filled with other ram from some other Power Mac G4's the guy had that I gotten mine from. i would assume they are all ATLEAST 128 so there will be atleast 620 total. though its possible some are bigger and I might have up to a gig. i Dont know. its got a 10 gig hard drive, though Im probably going to get a bigger one soon. Can a clean install of tiger run well on 10 gigs though? I has an ATI card in an AGP slot. I dont know much beyond that however.
 
Just done a quick net search and one guy recommends 13gb for Tiger. Hard drives are cheap though so you could always get a new one. IDE that is! up to a max of 128gb I think. I put a sata pci card in mine so I could add bigger sata drives. A 120gb would be ok.
You sound ok for ram, although the more the better.
 
kaiserw0lf said:
Mine is a 450 mhz, and it came with 256 ram standard but it is filled with other ram from some other Power Mac G4's the guy had that I gotten mine from. i would assume they are all ATLEAST 128 so there will be atleast 620 total. though its possible some are bigger and I might have up to a gig. i Dont know. its got a 10 gig hard drive, though Im probably going to get a bigger one soon. Can a clean install of tiger run well on 10 gigs though? I has an ATI card in an AGP slot. I dont know much beyond that however.
Click to expand...

look in the Applications Folder >> System Profiler >> double click, this will tell you about all of your installed hardware, ram etc among other things :)

And NO, OS X will NOT run well on a 10GB HDD......yuck yuck yuck....!
 
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