Leopard downgrade to Tiger possible?

I have a powerpc G4 dual 867 mhz dual optical machine that I've read is the minimum requirement for Leopard to run. The current OS is 10.4.11. I have upgraded the memory to the maximum 2 gig possible, it has an 80 gig hard drive and an additional internal 240 gig hard drive which I use for data storage. Is it possible to downgrade from Leopard back to Tiger if I find the machine can't really cope with Leopard? If I backed up my programs etc to my data disk and did an erase and install, would it also erase that drive too? I use the machine mainly for music production and MS office.

Any comments would be much appreciated.

Yes, it's possible to remove Leopard and reinstall Tiger provided you're willing to do an erase. Backing up your programs and data to the additional storage drive should be safe as long as you keep a close eye on what you're doing during the erase and reinstall process.

Note that any programs you have currently running in Leopard would have be reinstalled to Tiger.

Having said all that, I believe your machine as you currently have it configured should be satisfactory to run Leopard.

Regards.

With 2GB memory and a DP the machine will handle Leopard just fine and as advised to go back to Tiger requires a format and clean install. You cannot downgrade the OS.

Thanks for the comments, I'm probably going to install Leopard. Can I ask on one point though, given that my machine can only have 2Gb ram, and my music program (Digital Performer) needs about 1Gb to run smoothly, will there be enough ram left for Leopard to run ok? Do you think I would be asking too much from the computer?

The program won't steal half your RAM and keep it to itself. Programs constantly utilise and give back memory, otherwise you'd be hard pressed to run any more than a single program on most computers.

I've got 2gigs and have 11 programs open at the moment.

you can simply run activity monitor to check the status of the memory and processes. This tool can also check/monitor the process that could be running in the background that's probably eating your memory. 2GB should be ok however it would entirely depend on the apps that you would be running in addition to you DP programs.