powermac g4 upgrade needed???

[mac maniac]

Hi, I have just got hold of a 2nd hand but excellent conditiion 12 inch powerbook g4.

I need to upgrade it and not sure what to do!

Can I upgrade the ram from 256 meg to 1gb and will it take a 100-120 gb hard drive.

Also what version of osx could install on there? At the moment its running 10.2.
Could i install Tiger or even better Leopard?

I also have a three dongle which i use on my other macbook and would like to use this with the powerbook.

Ive currently got a intel macbook and want to use the same programs on both macs i.e.: Toast, Offfice mac, Handbrake, I tunes etc.

A lot of questions i know but i need a little help on this one!

Dave

 

[cantthinkofone]

whats the other specs on it? You could run panther on it maybe even tiger.

1GB would help. And a bigger hard drive is up to you.

 

[TDM21]

1. Ram is easily upgradable. There is a small access panel on the bottom of the computer. Take that off and there will be one slot open for RAM. Your system will either have a 128MB or 256MB stick soldered onto the logic board, but the other slot can hold up to 1GB. It has to be DDR PC2700. The hard drive is upgradable but you have to disassemble the system to get to it. There are about 30 screws you have to keep track of. Instructions can be found at iFixit.com.

2. I would suggest installing Tiger onto the PowerBook. After the upgrades the system will run it very well, but obviously not as fast as your MacBook. Leopard will also run on the system, but I think doing so is more of a personal preference. Getting 1GB of RAM installed is what really makes a difference in the performance of either operating system.

3. I'm not sure what you mean by three dongle.

4. All the apps you mention are universal binaries and can run on both Intel and PPC Macs so you won't have an issue with that. You will find, however, that HandBrake and Toast are much slower when it comes to encoding videos. You may want to leave those tasks for your MacBook.

 

[mac maniac]

Thanks for the reply's,

The three dongle is a usb modem from '3 mobile', cant get it to even register on the powerbooks screen at the moment, same goes with a 320 gb WD external i have...could be not enough ram???

I think ill go for Tiger and 1gb ram upgrade, hard drive replacement sounds like too much work!

Thanks again for the advice,

Dave