Upgrading a lab of Macs

[jessespk]

Hey all-

I am upgrading a lab of 20 G4 & G5 PowerMacs (currently running Tiger). They need to have Office (or iWork, or both), CS3 (they currently have old Macromedia Studio MX and Adobe design suite- really just NEED Flash, Dreamweaver, and PS), and a normal array of various software (FF, an FTP client, etc.) and iLife.

I was hoping to deploy (via Firewire cloning) an image of Leopard with CS3 (including DW, PS, FL), Office 08, and other various software above.
However, I'm getting worried that the G4s might not be able to handle it.
The G5s are dual core 2Ghz- real great machines. The G4s on the other hand, are 800Mhz, 40GB HDD, 512MB RAM. Getting up there in years, but still great machines.

Do you think they could handle Leopard? And CS3 web suite? I would REALLY like to keep the G4s and G5s running the same image, as it is one lab and it's not a power-user situation for most of our users...

I'm planning on DeepFreezing them as well, with a ThawSpace for user storage, to make sure they stay running like new with each reboot.

What do you think? Any advice on quick deployment (of whatever I decide) with the disk image? Maybe a network setup for updates?

Thanks!

 

[gugucom]

You better retire at least the G4s for minis.

 

[Techhie]

While the G4s may have been rock solid machines, CS3 barely runs on them, especially in a single-CPU machine. It would be a great investment to find some Intel hardware.

 

[DSPalpatine]

Not sure those G4s will run Leopard, officially at least. If they are the dual-800 MHz Quicksilver G4s, they aren't officially supported for 10.5 (the minimum speed is 867 MHz). Yes, there are workarounds to get Leopard running on below minimum-spec hardware, but at this point, given the age of the machines, not sure how cost- and time-effective it would be for you. Those machines would need, at the very least, more RAM as well to run Leopard acceptably.