Upgrade to 10.4 or 10.5 for old iBook?

[hillpepper]

Hi all,
I have an aging iBook G4 (Could be late '03/ early '04 model). I'm trying to upgrade it because I'm a teacher and can't afford to buy a new one and I don't want to go to Vista either , so... I've ran YASU to clean up, and will buy 1GB RAM (max I think...), Only thing is 4th Gen iPods don't work on iTunes versions prior to 8 and I can't install iTunes8 on Panther 10.3. (coincidnece? )

So, I need to know if 10.5 will run a lot slower on an old iBook than 10.4. And if you think it is worth the extra $50-$70 to get a 10.4 over 10.5
See specs below. It is still a bit slow but I haven't upgraded the RAM yet from 256MB but will very soon.

iBook
OS X 10.3
1GHz G4
1GB RAM
Details M9418LL/A

Thank you for your help!

 

[spinnerlys]

Go the Tiger road, I have a similar iBook, that came with Panther, and the upgrade to Tiger brought some speed improvements.
But with Leopard my iBook is feeling a lot slower, so save some money and get a cheaper Mac OS 10.4 version.

The only thing Tiger is missing for me is Spaces and Quick Look, but that I remedied with upgrading to a an Intel MBP.

 

[hillpepper]

Many thanks Spinnerlys!

 

[gonyr]

i have the same ibook as you, with 768 mb of RAM. It runs great with tiger, although it sometimes slows down with many things open. I've always been happy with tiger, and don't see any reason to move to leopard. I'm planning on keeping this machine until either apple creates a 10" laptop, or I decide to go with the hackintosh dell mini 9.