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Max OS for eMac?

H

houdinilogic

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 3, 2012
4
0
i was given an emac and i was wondering if i could upgrade to 10.5.8 on this. I am also planning on buying 2x1gb ram if that helps.
system specs:
1.25 ghz powerpc g4, 1gb memory
 
I have an eMac 1.42GHz running 10.5.8 and once you use something like xSlimmer to get rid of all the useless Intel stuff it really runs great with the 2GB RAM.
 
thanks guys. also what do you mean by useless intel stuff? and by the time i'm done installing everything, i plan on having only a third of my hard drive free (25 gb). would this impact speed at all?
 
houdinilogic said:
i was given an emac and i was wondering if i could upgrade to 10.5.8 on this. I am also planning on buying 2x1gb ram if that helps.
system specs:
1.25 ghz powerpc g4, 1gb memory
Click to expand...

10.5.8 works great on my iBook. If it's a later model, max out the RAM at 2GB.

I got a 1GB stick from a trusted seller on eBay for $21.99.
 
houdinilogic said:
i was given an emac and i was wondering if i could upgrade to 10.5.8 on this. I am also planning on buying 2x1gb ram if that helps.
system specs:
1.25 ghz powerpc g4, 1gb memory
Click to expand...

I can attest to running OS X Leopard (10.5.8) on the exact same spec'd eMac. It my Mom's sole computer, works pretty well. Have yet to upgrade the ram or run XSlimmer, but I hear it will increase performance.
 
houdinilogic said:
thanks guys. also what do you mean by useless intel stuff? and by the time i'm done installing everything, i plan on having only a third of my hard drive free (25 gb). would this impact speed at all?
Click to expand...

I don't think that free space would affect speed. But by "useless Intel stuff", I mean that Leopard (10.5) has a lot of files, code, resources, etc. that is in the OS but only applies if your computer is an Intel Mac. This is because Leopard was designed to run on both Intel and PowerPC Macs. Applications like xSlimmer get rid of these unnecessary Intel files or whatever that your PowerPC Mac can't even use, and therefore the performance is greatly improved.
 
houdinilogic said:
thanks guys. also what do you mean by useless intel stuff? and by the time i'm done installing everything, i plan on having only a third of my hard drive free (25 gb). would this impact speed at all?
Click to expand...

I saw a performance boost after using Xslimmer. It also frees up space on your HD.

If you're new to PowerPC Macs, you might look around these forums for video players such as VLC, MPlayer and MacTubes as well as PowerPC-friendly browsers such as Camino and TenFourFox. There are plenty of things you can do to optimize performance on your eMac. For video conversion, I prefer Any Video Converter, though there are also other options. I use Bean for Word Processing and, again, there are other good choices.

With all the changes I've made since I first got my iBook, I can tell you that there is a difference in performance compared to when I first bought it. You should see the same improvement in your eMac with a few good enhancements.
 
thanks for the help everyone! you guys probably saved me a lot of frustration over trial and error. i just bought ram and the xslimmer program and i will look into programs geared towards powerpc.
 
eMac's only use low density ram. If you put in a high density stick, it will read as being only half its stated size.
 
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