OS9 or OSX for clamshell ibook?

[student_trap]

Hello all,

I just took delivery of a clamshell ibook that i bought from ebay last week and have been wondering whether OSX would run well or not on it.

The specs are:
Indigo Firewire version
366mhz G3
193mb ram
10GB Hard drive
Airport fitted

AT the moment it is running OS9 very smoothly indeed, and I dont have enough cash at the moment to upgrade it in any way. I would leave OS9 on it, however I have never used the operating system before, so wondered whether it would be wise to upgrade it to panther, as I have a copy lying around.

My concern is that installing panther would leave the machine feeling much slower, as i'd rather have a faster machine that can't do as much than a machine can do most things but takes ages to open up the finder.

The question is then, that considering my use anyway (typing and internet use), would I be shooting myself in the foot by upgrading to panther?

Thank in advance

Student_trap

 

[yellow]

The question is then, that considering my use anyway (typing and internet use), would I be shooting myself in the foot by upgrading to panther?

Internet use is going to be difficult on a Mac with a 10 year old OS.
Not too many modern compliant browsers running on OS9.

 

[maflynn]

if you want to stick with OS9, then you need to live with the old internet explorer or icab

I've used both and found that all things being equal, icab provided the best experience. One of the surprising things I found running OS9 on my G4 Cube was how fast things were. I have an old version of office, and PS5 (and iCab) and found doing many things just as fast as my MBP. Of course I wasn't multitasking and I wasn't really stressing the machine but doing "normal" stuff, email, office apps and light photoshop, OS9 was just as fast as Leopard.

If you want to go to OSX be prepared to up the memory 193meg of ram is just too small to run OSX.

 

[JamesGorman]

If you go with OSX it will be slow, that processor just wouldn't cut it. It may be possible with more ram, but i wouldn't advise it.

 

[student_trap]

Hello again,

thanks for all of the replies. They have been very helpful.

Ok well I have the machine up and running, and to be quite honest, It's doing pretty well for most of my needs. The 192 MB of ram seems to be ok, although i am not sure if there is any sort of activity monitor so that i could check?

Also, looking at ram costs it going to be quite expensive to upgrade anyway, which seems a little pointless on an old machine that does a good 80% of what i would like it to.

As for browsers, i had a bit of a scare when my university computer registration page wasn't supported by IE5, however it did manage to work in icab (thank you sooo much maflynn for that golden piece of info!), so my computered can now work on my uni network (one thing that is certain is that the ibook probably never thought it would ever be connected to a 100Mbps connection!)!

Thanks once again all

Student_trap

 

[molala]

I would try it.

I ran Panther (10.3) fine on a 333MHz Powerbook G3 with the original 4GB hard drive. It had 320MB RAM though. I did a custom install and only picked the essential bits because I wanted to keep the OS under 2GB.

I don't have that machine anymore, but have another 500MHz Powerbook G3 running Panther with 256MB RAM. It's only being used for Firefox 2, which runs fine.