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I'm installing OSX 10.5 Leopard on my iBook G4 and it's SLOW

Buffsteria

Buffsteria

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 9, 2012
227
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I have the original iBook G4 14", 1Ghz, with a little over 1 GB RAM...the screen is saying 5 hours to go on the install of Leopard....is this normal? It really doesn't seem to be overestimating, it's going very slow.

I hope this install isn't a mistake.
 
I have had Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard installed on my G4 iBook with 1 GHz and 1.25 GB RAM and it was a slower overall experience using it than with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Thus I reverted back to Tiger.

But the actual install took less than an hour, so either your DVD is scratched or the optical disk drive (ODD) is dying.
 
I shouldn't have done it. At the end of the install after reboot into desktop, I get the swirling rainbow pinwheel on the corner and can't click anything.

How do I downgrade to Tiger without losing everything?
 
I had to go through many obstacles to get it working. What finally fixed my Finder crashing on logon was booting with the Leopard disk, deleting all my preferences using terminal, running fsck, zapping the PRAM, so I could finally get disk utility from the install disk to repair permissions. It was hanging on repair permissions.

Then it finally booted....into Mac OSX 10.5 setup assistant! I thought it was odd but I filled it all out...and then it looped back into setup assistant!

So I followed the tips I found online saying to startup in safe mode, NOT login, click the back arrow once, then the updates installed...took about an hour for the update progress bar to get anywhere....

But finally I have a fully functional iBook G4 running Leopard. Gotta figure out how to back up all my files (documents, photos, music, videos) somehow. Because I think I need to unbloat the system with a clean install. Lots of old crap apps in there.

And yes the RAM is maxed out. I'm thinking of putting an SSD in there to replace the 60GB HD.
 
Buffsteria said:
But finally I have a fully functional iBook G4 running Leopard. Gotta figure out how to back up all my files (documents, photos, music, videos) somehow.
Click to expand...

Time Machine, no? You can selectively backup directories and folders so you can only have what you need in a backup, without the other crap. Very useful feature. :)
 
alexreich said:
Time Machine, no? You can selectively backup directories and folders so you can only have what you need in a backup, without the other crap. Very useful feature. :)
Click to expand...

Thanks, Alex! I'll look into it, I never used Time Machine for backups before but I think it might be what I need.
 
Buffsteria said:
Thanks, Alex! I'll look into it, I never used Time Machine for backups before but I think it might be what I need.
Click to expand...

You can open Time Machine prefs inside System Preferences, tell it what specifically to back up, tell it what volume to back it up to (i.e. external USB or FireWire drive), then schedule or initiate a backup, and you're off!

Once the Time Machine backup is complete you can reinstall Leopard on your machine, and then use the restore from Time Machine backup option when setting up your Mac after the OS reinstalls.

After the Time Machine backup restores, you'll get back the files and settings you had previously, but on a new re-loaded OS (and in your case without all of the stuff you didn't need taking up disk space).
 
They may be capable of running leopard but whatever os a machine maxes out on running is going to run slow and your going to want to run the one just before for optimum performance and compatibility.
 
Lil Chillbil said:
They may be capable of running leopard but whatever os a machine maxes out on running is going to run slow and your going to want to run the one just before for optimum performance and compatibility.
Click to expand...

That's a bit of a broad statement, though. Sometimes it's actually a pretty nice machine with its latest possible OS, maybe even better than the previous!

I've run Leopard on a MDD G4 (dual 1.25), and a June 2004 dual 1.8 G5. Both of these machines handled it extremely nicely, and I wouldn't even dream of going down to Tiger on the G5. Leopard ran fine on the MDD with 512MB and 1GB of RAM, even, and it flew on the G5 with 2GB. (I'm pretty sure this applies to some of the earliest Intel Macs with Snow Leopard as well, but I can't really vouch for it considering I don't own any of those machines, not to mention it's slightly off-topic in the context of this board.) I'd especially wager using Leopard on the G5 to be nicer than Tiger, though, if for no other reason the wider range of applications that can run on it.

I will agree on the iBooks, though - Leopard, for me, has been a bit of an extremely sluggish and irritating experience. (And this is on the mid-2005 1.33ghz one!) Maybe dropping in a better HDD than the stock one would really ease things up, I'm not sure... I'll definitely give it a shot sometime, but until then I'm sticking to Tiger on it and can certainly understand why one would.
 
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