I was wondering if Leopard would slow down my old iBook. It's a 1ghz G4 with 1.12gb RAM. Would Leopard be okay, or should I just keep Tiger on it?
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iBook 1.0ghz G4 with Leopard
- Thread starter KJdanReuben
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My friend has a 1GHz iBook G4 and is installing Leopard on it, I'll ask him how fast it is when I see him later today.
Just talked to my friend, he said that it was not very much slower than Panther (he didn't have Tiger on it), so I'd say you could definitely upgrade and not see much of a loss in speed. 
runs fine
I have an identical iBook. (Except I think you mean 1.25 GB RAM?). Overall, my feeling is that the speed is about the same. Coverflow runs smoothly, but it takes so long for all the icons to initially render it's not really worth it in most cases. QuickLook works nicely, but it often takes a second or two to load (versus almost instant loading on an Intel Mac). Leopard Mail's IMAP is less quirky than Tiger's for me - it's not faster, but there are less hangs and hicups with IMAP mailboxes. I've had iCal, Mail, and Safari crash once apiece, but I don't think that's because of the G4.
If it's your only Mac, I would probably save the $129 towards a new Mac, since your iBook is 3+ years old and out of support. If you've got multiple Macs and are buying the family pack (or whatever the 5 license version is called), I would say go for it.
I have an identical iBook. (Except I think you mean 1.25 GB RAM?). Overall, my feeling is that the speed is about the same. Coverflow runs smoothly, but it takes so long for all the icons to initially render it's not really worth it in most cases. QuickLook works nicely, but it often takes a second or two to load (versus almost instant loading on an Intel Mac). Leopard Mail's IMAP is less quirky than Tiger's for me - it's not faster, but there are less hangs and hicups with IMAP mailboxes. I've had iCal, Mail, and Safari crash once apiece, but I don't think that's because of the G4.
If it's your only Mac, I would probably save the $129 towards a new Mac, since your iBook is 3+ years old and out of support. If you've got multiple Macs and are buying the family pack (or whatever the 5 license version is called), I would say go for it.
Actually, CoverFlow is nice.
I'm going to double back on what I said yesterday about CoverFlow's usefullness on an older G4. Yesterday evening my wife spent about an hour flipping through our movies folder watching old videos, and she loved it. It really is a great way to browse through pictures and movies, with the only drawback being that on a G4 it's going to need a bit longer to load up all the icons. That being said, I still don't know if I'd recommend upgrading if your only machine is an iBook, unless you are going to use Time Machine. If you've got an external disk, and aren't using it regularly for backups, but you would if you got Leopard, do yourself a favor and upgrade.
I'm going to double back on what I said yesterday about CoverFlow's usefullness on an older G4. Yesterday evening my wife spent about an hour flipping through our movies folder watching old videos, and she loved it. It really is a great way to browse through pictures and movies, with the only drawback being that on a G4 it's going to need a bit longer to load up all the icons. That being said, I still don't know if I'd recommend upgrading if your only machine is an iBook, unless you are going to use Time Machine. If you've got an external disk, and aren't using it regularly for backups, but you would if you got Leopard, do yourself a favor and upgrade.
My wife has an iBook almost identical to your specs, other than memory. Hers is at 768 MB. Leopard seems to run great, she's had no issues and everything seems to run as fast as before if not faster. Plus she loves the Mosaic screensaver, I think she'd be happy with the upgrade if that's all it had
EDIT: Oh, this is coming from 10.3, not 10.4 if that makes a difference.
EDIT: Oh, this is coming from 10.3, not 10.4 if that makes a difference.