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buying Tiger?

V

VintageMac

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 19, 2007
114
1
A few months ago I got a refurbished MB 2.0 running 10.4.10. I also have an eMac G4 1.25 with 512MB ram running 10.3.9. I'm thinking Leopard would slow the eMac to a crawl and I really don't want to spend $200. for a family pack. Now that 10.5. is out, is it possible to get an upgrade from 10.3. to 10.4. for a very reduced price? If so, where? I'd prefer if both my computers were running the same OS. Thanks for any tips!

Vintage
 
How much are you looking to spend for a copy of Tiger? I may be persuaded to sell my retail DVD copy if the price is nice.

Zack
 
admiraldennis said:
Buy a cheap used copy from eBay.
Click to expand...

Can any copy of 10.4. be updated free online to 10.4.10.?

Do I need to look for one that is specifically for the eMac?

Is this legit-- to buy used off of eBay?

Will my 512mb ram be sufficient?


CarlsonCustoms, the prices I'm seeing on eBay are about $40. including shipping.

Vintage
 
VintageMac said:
Can any copy of 10.4. be updated free online to 10.4.10.?

Do I need to look for one that is specifically for the eMac?

Is this legit-- to buy used off of eBay?

Will my 512mb ram be sufficient?


CarlsonCustoms, the prices I'm seeing on eBay are about $40. including shipping.

Vintage
Click to expand...

Question 1: Yes

Question 2: No, as long as you buy a retail copy.

Question 3: Yes, assuming you get the physical disk (which you will obviously get) and license. Now the person selling it to you needs uninstall it, but there is no way to verify what the seller does, of course. Think of it like buying a used music CD. It is fine for you to buy it, but the person that is selling it theoretically needs to delete any songs they ripped from that CD.

Question 4: I think 512 RAM will be fine, but that is an unpopular opinion around here as everyone seems to think you need a gig of ram to do anything on a computer. Obviously it depends what you are doing, but my wife has a 1.33 GHZ Powerbook G4 with 512 MB of RAM that she uses for Mail, iPhoto, Safari, Word, Excel, and the occasional iMovie/iDVD project and has no trouble at all. I have an iMac G5 (see sig) with less than a gig and I am a bit more of a "power" user than her (I use GarageBand, Final Cut Express, etc.) and it works fine. Would more RAM be better? Sure, but it will not be unusable as many here will try to claim.
 
slu, this is helpful. Thanks. I'm assuming the license is a paper original, right?

Vintage
 
I think there is a paper copy of the license, but I am not sure if you need to have it if you have the original disk since the license is on there as well. And I am not positive there is a paper copy. I do have a retail copy of Tiger that I can check when I get home and I will update you then.

Good luck on your Tiger hunt!
 
I think if you upgraded the memory though, you could easily run Leopard on that machine.

I have Leopard installed on a 867 MHz G4 tower with 1.25 Gigs of RAM and it runs very well indeed. It seems (subjectively) faster than Tiger in many respects although I know a benchmark might say otherwise.

I have found that the major limitation for installing Leopard on older machines is actually the graphics card. Most Apple machines can't change the graphics card and even the towers have limited options. On my machine Leopard runs quite fast, but some visual elements are missing like transparency effects and so on. The only time it "pauses" is when some giant graphic translation is going on like starting Time Machine.

If I was you I would back everything up, "borrow" a copy of Tiger and of Leopard off a friend and do some testing. Then purchase whichever one you think works best.

As long as you are using the retail disks for the OS (or copies of them), (and not those grey disks that came with the machine itself), any version should install on your machine and you can also update accordingly with no trouble over licences etc. and no worry that Apple will "find out" and flag you as illegal or whatever.
 
i have a 1.25 emac as well. i put a 1 GB Ram stick into it. i think it was $60. now i have 1.5 GB total.

the reports here on mac rumors said that leopard runs well on G4 machines, even better than tiger. i'll wait till 10.5.3 and install it then.

if i was you i would not buy tiger. i'd rather invest $60 in ram and $60 more to get a leopard family pack compared to the single license. it will serve both computers for the next two years.

and it's so much better to have the same system on both machines. eventually many programs of functions will require leopard. just look at .mac synching, there they all of a sudden made you upgrade to tiger and you couldn't sync from 10.4 to 10.3 anymore.
 
I have a 1.25GHZ eMac running Leopard and it runs great.. I can't say if it's any faster than Tiger or not, but I KNOW it's definitely NOT slower ..
 
I had a 1.42 G4 mini, and it did fine on 10.3.9, but when I installed Tiger the performance went to pot. I would not even try to run Tiger on a G4 if you are used to Panther. Reports seem to say that Leopard runs faster/better than Tiger, so it may be better to skip Tiger completely. Just my 2 cents.
 
andiwm2003 said:
i have a 1.25 emac as well. i put a 1 GB Ram stick into it. i think it was $60. now i have 1.5 GB total.

the reports here on mac rumors said that leopard runs well on G4 machines, even better than tiger. i'll wait till 10.5.3 and install it then.

if i was you i would not buy tiger. i'd rather invest $60 in ram and $60 more to get a leopard family pack compared to the single license. it will serve both computers for the next two years.

and it's so much better to have the same system on both machines. eventually many programs of functions will require leopard. just look at .mac synching, there they all of a sudden made you upgrade to tiger and you couldn't sync from 10.4 to 10.3 anymore.
Click to expand...

Thanks for everyone's help here. I checked with Crucial RAM from this site and it shows that the maximum RAM for this eMac is 1gb, therefore I can only add 512mb. Yet you said you added 1gb for 1.5 total. Can anyone explain? How do I tell if one of my slots are empty or if there are 256mb in each of them?

Vintage
 
I told you the RAM nuts would come out. If you are looking to increase your performance a bit, more RAM would certainly help, but your machine will run fine with Tiger right now. Especially since you already have a MB Pro. The cheapest way for you to go is just to get a retail copy of Tiger.

And I did check my retail copy of Tiger and there is a paper license, but it is not specific to the disk or anything, so I don't think it is required. If you get a retail copy, you should be OK.
 
Ram

The question of how much RAM is appropriate is not one of "RAM nuts." It's a question of how you use your computer.

512MB under Tiger on a PowerPC Mac (Intel is a different story) is fine if you either 1) don't run many programs at once or 2) don't switch between programs that often. Simplifying, 512MB is enough to hold the OS and one or two major programs. Any other programs that are loaded will be swapped out to disk. Anytime you switch to a program that has been swapped out to disk, you'll have to wait for it to load from disk again. You'll see a pause with a beachball while this happens.

If you're like me and run multiple programs and switch between them often, you'll get frustrated with the constant pausing every time you switch programs with 512MB. In my old 12" PowerBook I had 1.25 GB and it was just barely enough most of the time to avoid swapping and pauses.

If I were you, I'd upgrade the eMac to either 1.25GB or 1.5GB by adding a 1GB RAM stick and buy Leopard. Leopard has lots of new goodies for developers and lots of cool software will be coming out in the next few months that's Leopard only. A 1.25GHz G4 will be plenty of horsepower to run Leopard.

The manual will tell you the eMac will only take 512MB RAM modules, but I understand that a 1.25GHz eMac will actually take 1GB modules, which weren't in production when the eMac came out.
 
Thanks again for your help.

I have a MB, not MB Pro.

Is it okay to have a 1 gb of RAM in the one slot and 256 mb in the other?

Any recommendations on where to get the 1 gb? As I said earlier Crucial RAM only shows that the eMac will take up to two 512's.

Vintage
 
Following some of your counsel, I ordered 1gb of RAM from One World Computing today. Now I'll try to get a family pack of Leopard on eBay at a decent price. Does anyone know where this eBay OS comes from? I'm a bit puzzled since Apple seems to regulate their list prices coming from other retailers. I'll try to only buy the sealed NIB packages. Thanks for all your help.

Vintage
 
VintageMac said:
Following some of your counsel, I ordered 1gb of RAM from One World Computing today. Now I'll try to get a family pack of Leopard on eBay at a decent price. Does anyone know where this eBay OS comes from? I'm a bit puzzled since Apple seems to regulate their list prices coming from other retailers. I'll try to only buy the sealed NIB packages. Thanks for all your help.

Vintage
Click to expand...

regarding the ram: aplle says the emac can only have 1GB but for the 1.25 and 1.42 it works for up to 2GB of ram.

regarding ebay: be very careful! only buy from ebay shops or from people you really can trust (thousands of recommendations, similar items sold before). if you save more than 15% then something is likely wrong since the student discount is only a few bucks.
 
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