pre-intel powerbook: upgrade to leopard or no?

[bellie42]

Hi. I'm getting some mixed info between the folks at the Apple store and the "specialist" at an independent Mac service company and am hoping someone can clear up some of this info for me.

First, I recently brought my old G4 Powerbook into the apple store hoping to upgrade it to Leopard (it's currently Panther). The sales guy, not one of the "geniuses," tells me that my machine—because it is not intel-based—is not capable of being upgraded to Leopard and they no longer sell copies of Tiger.

Then, I go to an independent mac specialist place where the guy there tells me sure he can upgrade it to Tiger for me, but 1. my machine actually can be upgraded to Leopard, and 2. that he wouldn't recommend me doing it myself as it can be problematic if I have any corrupt files on my machine resulting in very costly repair.

So the point is, do I believe the Apple store guy and still only do the upgrade to Tiger or do I believe the specialist guy and buy Leopard? Also, do I have him install it or is he just giving me a sales pitch for his services? I've never experienced anything being difficult to install on a Mac and can't believe that this would be any different.

And last but not least, should I avoid running Leopard on this machine completely? As I was trying to find out the answers to the previous questions, I've run across numerous posts and articles about people having problems with Leopard on various older machines though I couldn't find anything about my model in particular.

If it matters, here are my machine's specs:

V 10.3.9
1.33 GHz PPC G4
1GB DDR SDRAM

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you!

 

[FadeToBlack]

It'll run Leopard just fine. I'm typing this on a 1.33GHz iBook G4 running Leopard and it runs perfectly fine. Before you do the install, just back up everything and do an "Erase and Install," and then your install should go smoothly. You usually only run into issues when doing an "Upgrade Install," which just replaces your system files and leaves all of your personal data intact. I've always just did an Erase and Install, to be safe. A lot of people do upgrade installs and don't have any issues at all, but I'm a bit paranoid.

Just be sure to back up everything that's important to you.

 

[bellie42]

Thank you very much! Doesn't fill me with a whole lot of confidence in the mac sales folks, but at least I don't have to buy a new laptop yet!

 

[FadeToBlack]

Thank you very much! Doesn't fill me with a whole lot of confidence in the mac sales folks, but at least I don't have to buy a new laptop yet!

Hey, no problem. Always glad to help!

Your PowerBook has the same amount of RAM as my iBook, too, BTW, so your Leopard experience should be close to the same as mine. Your PowerBook may have a faster HD, though. I'm pretty sure my iBook only has a 4200rpm drive and if I'm not mistaken, they put faster drives in the PowerBooks. Someone correct me if I'm wrong on that one.

Here's a link to Apple's tech specs page on Leopard.

 

[notjustjay]

I have a 1 GHz PowerBook (12"), running with 1.25 gigs of RAM. Leopard runs OK on it, but it's nothing to write home about. I suppose it's pretty good that this 5-year-old machine can run Apple's latest and greatest as well as it does, but I'm debating whether to roll back to Tiger (or sell it altogether and upgrade to a 15" MBP).

 

[lamina]

Check my thread on my PowerBook Leopard experience:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/374095/

 

[Sogo]

you can upgrade it to leaopard. I have found it to work quite fine. Granted I did start to feel the age of the powerbook. But most of the time it was fine.

 

[yg17]

I upgraded my parents 1.5GHz G4 Mac Mini from Tiger to Leopard and the difference is night and day. Leopard is a lot less snappier and I'm not getting the spinning beachball nearly as often as I did on Tiger.

 

[bellie42]

thanks so much everyone for the helpful info. I'm installing right now so i'll let you know how it goes.