Question about leopard on old g4

[NoSmokingBandit]

I may make a trade in the near future for a powermac g4. Its got a 500mhz cpu in it, which isnt supported officially, but i can install leo anyway, right? The question i have is how well would leo run on such hardware? Its got 640mb ram which isnt much, but not bad for an old g4. I plan on using this mainly for garageband and i would just install tiger and ilife 08, but apple doesnt uderstand backward compatible file formats so any songs i have worked on recently require ilife 09. I dont plan on editing on this machine, just recording single tracks while the software instruments play a backing track. Can this machine handle this or am i asking for a major headache?

 

[iBookG4user]

Unfortunately I fear that you will be asking for trouble with that setup. This is because both the OS and iLife 09 require a more powerful Mac than the 500MHz G4. You may want to consider getting a Mac Mini G4 instead, I believe you can get one of them for less than $250 on ebay and it would satisfy both system requirements.

 

[SmurfBoxMasta]

From my own experiences, plus what I have read ever since Leo was released, any G4 w/ less than 1.2ghz, 2GB ram and a QE+CI-capable video card will result in a very unsatisfactory experience........regardless of what tasks you use it for

So if it were me, I would entirely skip the machine you described, and go for something more up to date. If you feel that you really must get a G4, look for an MDD model....ie 1.25/1.42ghz, preferably a dual processor unit w/2Gb of ram and a Radeon 9800pro video card. Adding in a SATA controller and hdd's will help also, if possible.....

 

[old-wiz]

You can't get the standard Leopard install disk to work on an out of spec system; you have to go in and edit some of the files. It can be donel, but you can't just pop in your Leopard retail disk and go.

 

[NoSmokingBandit]

You can't get the standard Leopard install disk to work on an out of spec system; you have to go in and edit some of the files. It can be donel, but you can't just pop in your Leopard retail disk and go.

Yeah, im comfortable modifying install discs though. I've done several hackintoshes and a few linus deals so its no biggie. im really just concerned about performance, which bring us to:

From my own experiences, plus what I have read ever since Leo was released, any G4 w/ less than 1.2ghz, 2GB ram and a QE+CI-capable video card will result in a very unsatisfactory experience........regardless of what tasks you use it for

So if it were me, I would entirely skip the machine you described, and go for something more up to date. If you feel that you really must get a G4, look for an MDD model....ie 1.25/1.42ghz, preferably a dual processor unit w/2Gb of ram and a Radeon 9800pro video card. Adding in a SATA controller and hdd's will help also, if possible.....

Thanks a bunch, thats a lot of good info. Im not really looking for a G4, thats just what someone offered me as a trade for some stuff. Mac2sell puts it at about $100 and the stuff he wants from me is worth about $300, so i have a bit of bartering to do regardless. Thanks for all the info everyone!

 

[old-wiz]

I run Leopard on an iBook G4 1.33 mhz 1.25gb ram, and it runs fine.

 

[iBookG4user]

I run Leopard on an iBook G4 1.33 mhz 1.25gb ram, and it runs fine.

If Leopard will run on a 1.33MHz G4 then it will run on anything

And personally I would still look for a Mac Mini, as the G4s for for pretty cheap and even the most basic one should run Leopard OK. I have a 1.33GHz PowerBook G4 12" that runs Leopard fine.