G4 ibook 900MHz, Panther or Tiger?

[dogbone]

EDIT: I'm not with the computer now but I've just realised that if it was a 900MHz then it must be a G3..

I was just helping a friend to sort out their G4 ibook as it was chugging along. It's only got 256 Mb of Ram at the moment and he will be upgrading the Ram. He was wondering why it was a bit slow editing a 12 gb video file! (with 1 gig of free disk space). It's a bit better now but I've a couple of questions.

I noticed that it was running Panther and I was wondering if Tiger would see a performannce improvement on this machine or whether it would in fact slow it down.

Aslo is it OK to run non paired ram in these machines. Like would it be fine to put in a one gig stick next to the current 256. And are these easy to put the ram in yourself?

Thanx. DB.

 

[chaosbunny]

1. I don't know if Tiger will actually improve performance but it definitely won't slow the machine down. Even my Cube runs Tiger just fine (without core image of course), specs see my sig. Just put enough ram in it, 1gb seems like a good idea, and you'll get plenty of life out of this ibook.

2. Unpaired ram should be no problem in this machine, the 256 mb is soldered, maybe there are 128 soldered and one 128 mb stick in the slot. Is it a 12" or 14" ibook? I know that the 12" only has one slot but I do not know about the 14" one.

3. Adding the ram yourself should be no problem. Just read the manual or if you do not have it anymore find one at http://home.earthlink.net/~strahm_s/manuals.html#imcs

Good luck!

 

[tektonnic]

1. You can only put 512mb in, doesnt support 1gb

2. I have tiger on mine, runs fine, pretty much the same as Panther but with spotlight yay!