iMac G5 Tiger Help.

[shyoon]

Hey fellas, newbie here.

I have a stock iMac G5 20" inch (which means 256mb of RAM - so deathly slow), which I purchased in December of 2004. It currently runs on OSX Panther and it hasn't let me down once since I bought it nearly two years ago. It's a great machine. Just a bit slow.

Anyway, we also have two identical 12-inch iBook G4's running OSX Tiger, which, again, has run without a hiccup in the past year (albeit getting the battery recalled). Awesome portable laptop.

As I discovered recently, the iBook's come with OSX Tiger discs and I was wondering if I'm able to install Tiger on my iMac G5 using the provided discs. Will it work? And if so, will installing the new OS mean that all my old files on my iMac will be deleted?

The reason why I want to upgrade my iMac to Tiger is because I've heard its a faster operating system, and also because a lot of the new applications that's coming out is Tiger only, so I'm more or less confined to my current array of applications on my iMac. The reason why I don't want to buy OSX Tiger for my iMac is because a.) It's being replaced next year with (hopefully) a MBP and b.) Leopard is just around the corner.

So what do you think guys, will the OSX Tiger discs that were bundled with the iBooks work on my iMac?

Thanks in advance.

shyoon.

 

[Eidorian]

Get more RAM and then worry about Tiger/Leopard.

 

[WildCowboy]

It's a violation of the license to install OS X on multiple machines if you only have a single-user license.

And many Macs ship with machine-specific install discs, so it's doubtful you'd have any success.

First priority, get some RAM to tide you over until Leopard comes out...Panther will run fine once you get some RAM in it. You'll need it anyway once Leopard comes out.

 

[Chundles]

Tiger runs pretty poorly on machines with 256MB RAM, 512MB is the bare minimum.

Put as much RAM as you can afford into the iMac and wait till Leopard comes out next year. Put more RAM into your iBook and then grab a Family Pack of Leopard and then put it on both the Macs.

 

[shyoon]

Nah, I have no desire to run Leopard on the iMac, nor add more ram because I'm saving up to get a new computer by next year. I only asked because I wanted a better (and free!) OS to tide me over until sometime next year. Seems it won't work, so I won't bother.

Thanks for the input.