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is a dual 500 in this day and age enough to run tiger and even leapord

P

power g4

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 20, 2006
9
0
Hello and thankyou for reading,
As you read this im haveing a terrible time on a sawtooth 400 that was hit by lighning in a storm and is now plauged with freezeing problems.So regretting to turn back to windows i made a quick steal of ebay for a dual 500 g4 + a super drive that burns dvds at 16x!! Im not no power user by anymeans i chat with adium x and use safari and do an occasinal bittorrent (legal of course) but the orignal problem with the g4 400 before the lighning struck it was VERRY SLOW! and I HATE waiting and it thought because of the dual prossesers it would move it along (and Low End Mac says pick a dual 500 over a single 700) so tell me if im gunna need to upgrade it.

P.S is 512 enough to run tiger and/or leapord smoothley
 
Well. I run Panther (10.3) perfectly fine (well, it's a little sluggish) on an iMac G3 500Mhz with 384Mb Ram.

Tiger is a bit slower than panther, but it should run perfectly fine on that machine, methinks.
 
Thanks for posting,
allright so panthers a bit slow on a 500 "single" so if i get this right tiger should run perfectly on a 500 "dual".And how much more ram and do you think that a prosseser upgrade will need to be done to run leapord
 
power g4 said:
Thanks for posting,
allright so panthers a bit slow on a 500 "single" so if i get this right tiger should run perfectly on a 500 "dual".And how much more ram and do you think that a prosseser upgrade will need to be done to run leapord
Click to expand...

A 500MHz dual processor Mac is still a decent machine if you're aware of its limitations. It's not going to be suitable for serious video encoding or massive graphical applications but for email, internet, iTunes, word processing etc it will do just fine.

Leopard (note the spelling, just a handy hint, not being a nazi) will run on your machine. It won't have all the fancy eye candy unless you have a Core Image capable graphics card installed (I don't know which cards fit that description but have a look around) but it will run. Get as much RAM as you possibly can into the Mac, 512MB really won't cut it with Tiger - it's basically the bare minimum so anything around or over 1GB should be OK. RAM for old Macs is reasonably cheap now so if you can max out the RAM (I think the G4s went to 2GB) you'll be in good stead.

It's just a case of knowing what your Mac can do. Mine's not that old but the Intel switch has turned it into a dinosaur much faster than it would have been had we stayed with PPC but it still runs everything as fast as it did when I got it. I try not to do much video encoding with it but when I do it's an overnight job. Everything else runs perfectly well.
 
so itunes,textedit,email,bittorrent,safari will work hiccupless but i also found out it comes with a copy of ilife05,will that work ok?
 
Eidorian said:
I still say refurbished Intel Mac mini + putty knife + upgrades = better value.
Click to expand...
I'd go with Eidorian on this, although I am running 10.4 server on my dual 500. For user type apps, the mini(G4 or intel) with at least 1gb ram is the better option.
 
power g4 said:
so itunes,textedit,email,bittorrent,safari will work hiccupless but i also found out it comes with a copy of ilife05,will that work ok?
Click to expand...

Yeah, all those things will work just fine. iLife '05 will run - might be a little slow so if you can find a copy of iLife '06 you should grab it. iPhoto 6 is much, much faster than iPhoto 5 on all systems - on my iBook it was like someone had turbocharged iPhoto when I installed it, my start up times more than halved as did loading of my 5000+ photos.
 
power g4 said:
so itunes,textedit,email,bittorrent,safari will work hiccupless but i also found out it comes with a copy of ilife05,will that work ok?
Click to expand...
Before I put server on my dual 500, iLife and friends worked fine, and should continue to do so through at least 10.5.

It begs the question of when Apple plans to start discontinuing support for G3/G4 machines.
 
ok so this should be a overall solid machine for wht i want to do and i want to thank everybody for answering my questions thankyou again for your time











xXHunterXx
 
The applications you listed will run fine on that Power Mac G4. Just get lots of RAM for it. Still, if you're not a gamer, don't need the expansion, and want a little more future proof machine I say the mini.
 
is there a simple solution to solve?

my lap top, iBOOKG4, keeps freezeing and I have to force quit , mac 10.4.11,
and safari, icon comes up, safari not respondeing, on a web site. how do I stop the spinnning wheel? I know when it starts , auto force quit is next. please help
 
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