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eMac 1.42 Tiger Question

cocacolakid

cocacolakid

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Dec 18, 2010
1,108
20
Chicago
I just picked up a very clean 1.42 ghz eMac for a whopping $30. My intention is to put Leopard on it, add a few G4 friendly programs, and give it my brother's family as their second Mac. (I finally got my G4 Power Mac FW800 working properly and gave it to them last month and they're shocked by how nice the Apple experience is, even on an 8 year old machine. I'm slowly brainwashing the entire family into Mac addicts!)

Anyway, this currently has Tiger on it, and only 256 mb of ram. I know I'll have to add more ram to upgrade to Leopard, but I'm shocked by how snappy this eMac is running Tiger with only 256 mb of ram.

What is Tiger like on this eMac with 1 gb or 2 gb of ram? It must fly. I threw TenFourFox on there just to screw around and test playing Youtube videos and they play just fine, no stutter.

I've never played with Tiger much, I've only had Macs with Leopard and Snow Leopard. What kind of trade offs does keeping Tiger on there present compared to Leopard?

I'm not expecting them to do much video playing, but they will visit Youtube, other wise it's just mostly email and basic web surfing, so I know it will be a nice, inexpensive computer for them.

I'm going to add at least 1gb of ram regardless of which OS is on it (2gb is a bit pricey right now, maybe I'll add 1gb at a time).

Opinions on which OS will run best? If I max out the ram, will Leopard run much slower than Tiger will? (I'd prefer to give them a computer with the same OS on it as their Power Mac, which has Leopard).
 
leopard will be slower, but nicer than tiger :D esp if you have the right hardware to run it with all the bells and whistles turned on.:D
 
Geekbench's numbers make no sense. I didn't run it while Tiger was on the eMac, should have for a comparison, but with 10.5 installed and 1.25gb of ram it gave me a 708, so I checked it against the same machine on file with Geekbench, which showed a score of 830 or so with Tiger on it and 512mb of ram, but a 530 or so with 10.5 and 2 gb of ram. So 2gb of ram is slower than 1.25gb of ram, according to Geekbench's database.

Anyway, it's running fine with Leopard and the new ram in. It could use maxing out to 2gb for sure, but that will have to come later.

I am surprised at how nice these eMac's are, especially at the low prices they bring these days.
 
it's definitely worth upgrading the RAM and installing Leopard. there's a lot of good software that is universal binary but requires 10.5+.

also forget what Geekbench has to say. i've got machines with low Geekbench scores that perform better than machines with twice the score. when you're installing newer OSes like Leopard on older Macs, more RAM is not always the solution - keep Activity Monitor open so you can see what's bogging down your eMac. i downloaded MacPilot and turned off all of OS X's fancy animations and such, it speeds up older machines considerably. it actually did wonders for my iBook G4 1.33 which has 512MB RAM (which i'm using right now!)
 
I have Leopard on my eMac running at 1ghz with 1gb RAM. It actually runs pretty good! It can be sluggish at times though... Because u have a faster processor, if u were to max the ram out (2gb) you would have a great leopard machine....
 
It's pretty fast with 1.25 GB of ram. I passed it on to my brother about a week ago and they're very happy with it. The total cost out of pocket was $30 for the eMac, another $30 for 1GB of ram, $5 for a mouse, and $10 for a usb wifi adapter. $75 for a nice computer, it's hard to beat that considering it has a monitor and came with a keyboard too.

Once they can swing another $30, they'll add another GB of ram. Money is tight and this worked out well.
 
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