iBook G4 800MHz and Leopard

[cyberghoser1]

Hello, i just got an iBook G4 800 MHz, very well treated, like brand new, hopefully it has a new battery, no airport installed but i use a Ralink usb dongle and its fine, currently its running on Tiger 10.4.11 successfully, and its very nice, i want to install Leopard on it, i know the limit of 867MHz for Leo, but i might use LeopardAssist, i wanted to know if anyone has this same iBook running Leopard on it so i could take some advice

my iBook has the following configuration

PowerPC G4 processor at 800MHz
640 MB RAM(Maxed out)
30 GB HD (probably at 4200 rpm)

if anyone is close to this let me know if your are satisfied by how good is running leopard on yours or if its better to keep Tiger. Thanks.

 

[Hrududu]

I've run Leopard on a 500MHz G4 Cube and its not unusable. You say your iBook is maxed out at 640MB of RAM which is only true if its a G3 not a G4. Any G4 iBook can accept a 1GB stick of DDR RAM to go along with the memory thats soldered onto the board. With that extra RAM, I wouldn't see any problems with putting Leopard on it.

 

[OrganMusic]

I not only run but regularly use leopard on my 450 mhz Cube in 512 MB. As long as you don't ask too much of it it works fine.

A few comments on softwares:

Safari - Perfectly useable, can be a little slow at times. Flash is of course very slow so make sure you use clicktoflash.

Mail.app - works fine, again a little sluggish at times but perfectly useable.

iTunes - works, though playback eats >20% processor

Photoshop elements 6 - surprisingly useable.

iWork pages - runs OK though I haven't tried large or complex documents which would probably bog it down quite a bit.

MS Word 2004 - probably runs better since it's native PPC code.

Tried Final Cut Express -- installer just laughed at it.

Do make sure you know if your USB WiFi stick will work with leopard, I think some of those had drivers for Tiger but not Leopard.

I got leopard on it by cloning the HD of a friend's powerbook via Firewire target mode.

 

[cyberghoser1]

I've run Leopard on a 500MHz G4 Cube and its not unusable. You say your iBook is maxed out at 640MB of RAM which is only true if its a G3 not a G4. Any G4 iBook can accept a 1GB stick of DDR RAM to go along with the memory thats soldered onto the board. With that extra RAM, I wouldn't see any problems with putting Leopard on it.

I didnt know at that time that i could max ram beyond 1gb, now its solved since i ordered 1gb module, thanks

I not only run but regularly use leopard on my 450 mhz Cube in 512 MB. As long as you don't ask too much of it it works fine.

A few comments on softwares:

Safari - Perfectly useable, can be a little slow at times. Flash is of course very slow so make sure you use clicktoflash.

Mail.app - works fine, again a little sluggish at times but perfectly useable.

iTunes - works, though playback eats >20% processor

Photoshop elements 6 - surprisingly useable.

iWork pages - runs OK though I haven't tried large or complex documents which would probably bog it down quite a bit.

MS Word 2004 - probably runs better since it's native PPC code.

Tried Final Cut Express -- installer just laughed at it.

Do make sure you know if your USB WiFi stick will work with leopard, I think some of those had drivers for Tiger but not Leopard.

I got leopard on it by cloning the HD of a friend's powerbook via Firewire target mode.

Thanks for your answer, i currently installed Leopard through LeopardAssist, for the time being i have 640mb ram and it appears leopard runs well, well safari 5 made my internet browsing better than under tiger even with TenFourFox, 1gb module will come in 2 days so i guess its gonna be better, i use clicktoflash of course, MacTubes does the job for youtube videos using QT and i'm good with it, my usb wifi stick is a tenda w541u v2.0 so its compatible with both Tiger & Leopard since it has a Ralink RT2870 chip, the bad thing is that the ugly tool by Ralink was eating up half of the cpu ~50%, but hopefully some people made an AirPort like preference pane/tool for it that made things a lot better, so overall i'm happy with it, next i'm gonna do is put a 100gb hd in it and its done