Upgrading to Leopard

[KingJobs]

I realize Leopard has been out for ages, but I'm just now starting to consider making the change.

I'm on a 1.8 GHz G5, 768 MB DDR SDRAM, 64 MB GeForce FX graphics card, and 150 GB HD... A good system from 2004. I bought it near the end of the Panther days, upgraded to Tiger shortly after and I've been running fairly smoothly since then.

My two main concerns:

1. Speed -- Will the system requirements mentioned above be enough to get a fairly enjoyable experience out of Leopard or will it run all the new features unbearably slow?

2. Applications -- I do most of my work using some fairly old software in Microsoft Office 2004 and Adobe Photoshop CS(1); I also play two games on occasion (as in once every couple of months or so) in Nascar 2003 and SimCity 4 Rush Hour. Otherwise, the two apps I use the most are Safari and Adium and I know they won't be a problem on Leopard. Will Leopard run them alright or do I have to buy upgrade software or something? I think the two games were discontinued awhile ago, at least for the Mac they were.

Thanks for the advice ahead of time. Hopefully there is somebody here with a similar hardware/software situation as myself.

 

[Hawkeye411]

Just CCC your systems as it is now and then do a fresh install. If it's no fast enough, reinstall from your CCC backup.
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[KingJobs]

Just CCC your systems as it is now and then do a fresh install. If it's no fast enough, reinstall from your CCC backup.
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Do I need an external drive for that? I have one...it's an 80 GB, but I store all my files on it and more than half of it is used up.

 

[Hawkeye411]

Yea .. you would need an external HD. IF you don't have one with enough space, do you have a friend that has one you can borrow?

 

[KingJobs]

Not that I know of... only an empty old 20 GB iPod and I know that won't be enough.

 

[California]

I would recommend at least 1.5 gigs of ram. I sold my beloved G4 1.5ghz Mac Mini (PowerPc) because it only had one gig of ram maxed and Leopard bogged down on it.

Can't you put like four or eight gigs of ram on that G5?

And you can pick up an external hd for like 100 bucks. It's worth it.

I'm running Leopard on a Powerbook g4 1.5 with 1.25 gbs of ram and an external hd.

 

[clevin]

I second that you need more memory.