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Tiger, Legally...

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danfog

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 9, 2008
30
0
My sister has a small problem with her 12" PowerBook that has kinda grown bigger and bigger. She got a new iPod Nano as a leaving present from her work and when she plugs it in to her PowerBook it won't mount. I said to upgrade iTunes to 8.0 because that's what the new iPods need. But she's running Panther on her PowerBook and while I have a Leopard disc I don't know if it will handle it or if it will even work because it came with my MacBook Pro. Tiger was the way forward but there is no way of getting Tiger, Legally. A conundrum, eh? And if I were to acquire a disc illegally, would I still be able to do updates e.t.c

I'm not sure exactly what the specs are but it has a G4 and I think 640MB of RAM. I thought Leopard required 1GB. I do have 2 512MB sticks from a MacBook and I know they work because I tried them in my MacBook Pro. Does that RAM fit the PowerBook?:confused:
 
Look for a Tiger retail copy on eBay. Not they gray install disks, unless you can find a set for the exact same model, release, and revision of her computer. Know those? Good.

It's good whether you know it or not. If not, play it safe and get a retail disk.
 
I personally found Tiger slightly slow (disabling Dashboard helped a lot) on a G4 with 640MB, but others are happy.

As the others said above, of course there are legal ways to get Tiger. Just go buy it. Although you're not eligible to use our Marketplace at this time, you could also look on other Mac forums... there are plenty of copies floating around with people who subsequently upgraded again / got rid of that computer, etc. Forum sale prices for Tiger have recently been around $50.

If you use eBay, you can also look up Microsoft's Live Cashback program, if you're in the US. eBay prices for Tiger seem to run around $85-90, and you get 30% cash back via Microsoft from their program (I know, absurd, cash in while it lasts), which brings the cost to the same range as forum sales.

I wouldn't get Leopard for that computer, personally, and definitely not unless you're going to upgrade north of 1GB of RAM... diminishing returns. Better to save the money towards a Macbook instead.
 
Thanks for the replies. I completely forgot about eBay! Sadly, I live in the UK so the Microsoft Live Cashback Service isn't something I could do :(

Talking about RAM, does anyone know if there is a second RAM slot and, if there is, how to get to it? The only way I could think the to get 640MB is with a 512 and a 128...
 
It would help if you could get the processor speed in GHz, so you could use Apple-History to figure out which one it is, but for a Powerbook G4 / 12.1" that has 640MB, the most likely candidate is that it's the very first revision, which has an 867MHz G4, 128MB soldered on board (not removable / upgradable) and then 512MB in its single RAM slot. I'm not 100% sure -- you may need to do some Googling, but I think it might be able to be upgraded by replacing the 512MB module with a 1GB module (now this is PC2100 or PC2700, not a DDR2 module). At least, this wasn't on the official specifications for the original iBook G4 (both it and this list maximum RAM officially as 640MB, AFAIK), which also came with 128MB soldered on and one slot, but on that iBook you could do it and it worked fine.
 
danfog said:
<clip> but there is no way of getting Tiger, Legally.<clip>
Click to expand...

As has been stated above that is certainly far from true. In addition to eBay, Amazon has multiple copies available from the Amazon Sellers group, and it is still available from some other vendors such as MegaMacs.

Are they cheap? No- but legal copies are available.
 
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