tiger for old eMac

[smartalic34]

we have a family eMac (800MHz, 1GB RAM) currently running Panther 10.3.9. I'd really like to upgrade it to Tiger. it doesn't have a DVD drive (CD only), but I can use my MBP in target disk mode...

does anyone know where I can purchase Tiger (preferably cheaply)?

I'm having difficulty finding a website that sells it...

also, will there by any speed increase by upgrading to Tiger?

thanks in advance

 

[mwysolme]

I would look in ebay for Tiger. At quick glance I found:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Apple-Mac-OS-X-...ryZ80258QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

 

[smartalic34]

oh yeah, hadn't thought of that...

any insight on speed? will tiger speed up or slow down the machine?

 

[mkrishnan]

any insight on speed? will tiger speed up or slow down the machine?

With 1GB, it should do reasonably well with Tiger. Just make sure that you keep adequate free space (10% if possible) on the main HD. Watch your RAM for pageouts, and if you get them, try using fewer Dashboard widgets, one of the more common culprits. Tiger's base memory consumption, even outside of widgets, etc, seems to be higher than Panther's to the tune of roughly 128MB. I.E. Macs with 512MB were kind of on the cusp of acceptable performance with Panther, and 640 MB was on the same cusp with Tiger.

With sufficient RAM, Tiger is slightly (5-10%) faster on given hardware than Panther. On my iBook G4/800, Tiger was not very good on 640MB of memory until I disabled Dashboard, and it was still prone to beachballs. On 1.125GB, it was very nice.

 

[Satori]

oh yeah, hadn't thought of that...

any insight on speed? will tiger speed up or slow down the machine?

My experience on the exact same machine is that tiger seems a little snapier in the finder and makes no difference elsewhere.

 

[KingYaba]

Watch your RAM for pageouts, and if you get them, try using fewer Dashboard widgets

I disabled Dashboard altogether. Helped to run the MS Office '04 applications a little better.

 

[mBurns]

I used to have an eMac which ran Tiger. Granted, it was the 1.42 Ghz model but it had 1 GB of RAM and performance was acceptable. It didn't fly buy wasn't slow either. It's definitely a worthy upgrade for compatibility with newer programs.

 

[mkrishnan]

On my iBook G4/800, Tiger was not very good on 640MB of memory until I disabled Dashboard, and it was still prone to beachballs. On 1.125GB, it was very nice.

I disabled Dashboard altogether. Helped to run the MS Office '04 applications a little better.

 

[macman7002]

I would check eBay!

I have OS X 10.4.11 running on my iBook G3 900HMz at 640MB RAM and it works just fine! I only have a couple sluggish moments in iTunes and iMovie 2.