Powerbook G4 (only 1Gb RAM) - Panther to Leopard?

[goodsworthy]

I know this has kind of been dealt with before but I have a few specific questions.

I have a 2004 Powerbook G4 1.25GHz, 15", 80Gb HD, Panther.

I sadly succumbed to the lower RAM DIMM slot failure about 8 months ago and have therefore only been able to max out my PB to 1GB RAM.

I don't use the system for any intensive video/image analysis work but have noted a slow down and more frequent program hangs/freezes since the upgrade.

There are a few bits of software (again nothing massively resource heavy - papers for example) that i'd like to get my hands on but can't without upgrading the OS.

What is the general consensus about upgrading to Leopard given my peak in terms of upgrade options?

Would you guys advocate a complete disk reformat and Leopard installation from scratch? (obviously imaging everything to an external firewire HD first)

Or do you think that sadly *sniff* my G4 is not the man he used to be and I should shell out for something newer and more capable?

Thanks everyone

 

[eddyg]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-au) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20)

I've got Leopard running on two G4's with less memory than that without issues - if anything Leopard is better with low memory than Tiger IMHO. Go for it!

 

[clyde2801]

Leopard runs just fine on my 12" 1.5 ghz PB with 1.25 gigs of ram on it. Follow a couple of good sites online to maximize your setup by turning off all of the eye candy (like widgets, 3d dock, animations, etc) and it will run even better. A lot of pb owners, however, prefer to stick with 10.4 tiger.

 

[eRondeau]

Last week I downgraded my 1GHz iBook G4 from Leopard to Tiger because of performance issues. It ran Leopard, but it felt like it was always trying to pull a heavy trailer uphill, if you catch my meaning. It was sluggish at the best of times -- if it could sweat, it would have -- running only Safari, Mail, and iTunes. After dropping back to Tiger, however, it is actually quite responsive again. No regrets.

 

[AdeFowler]

I'd go for it. My old PowerBook runs Leopard very well. Forget things like iMovie and Garageband, but for Mail, Safari, etc, it'll be fine.