Keeping apps installed while going back to 10.4 ?

Hullo all,

My son has an iBook (2005) G4 12"/1.33GHz/40GB HD/1G ram with OSX 10.5 and several pre-installed applications, we bought it from a retired aged carer recently who doesnt have the original distribution disks but has backed up various disk images on the drive.

It has been suggested that 10.4 is a much better and faster OS for this laptop but I am concerned about losing functionality with existing apps whislt not getting clear reasons why 10.4 would be a compelling downgrade...

Is it possible to install 10.4 over the top of 10.5 (without any re-format) yet maintain any existing app linkages (either directly or by system mods) so they are still usable as I understand they are already registered.

ie. Is it possible to just change/rewrite the core 10.5 files such that the laptop wakes up running 10.4 (or a suitably patched version) that runs well on this machine without the huge slowdowns I have heard occurs with 10.5
or are the slowdowns a consequence of real improvements in 10.5 function.

I'm just not keen yet to try out the backed up application disk images just in case it cancels any previous registration keys or upsets the apps in any way at all (I am a PC man of old and not sure of this aspect).

Or is it possible I have been misled as to just how bad 10.5 is for this type of laptop - will 10.4 really be that much better, such as mouse/keyboard responsiveness when writing to USB etc Or, for example, would an upgrade to 1.5G ram or a faster (modern HD or flash) circumvent the need to go back to 10.4 at all etc

Thanks for reading and looking forward to responses,

Thanks

ps: This is actually my son's account but he is flat out with school/homework and we will both be using the laptop, cheers

Only by a clean install which will wipe the drive and without discs and registration codes they are illegal copies anyway, Even if say Archive and Install was available sometimes larger applications like Office etc require a fresh install, and registration.

Leopard should run well on the Macbook, maybe with a bit more memory and a larger HDD

Never had a PPC Mac myself. But have seen a lot of the long timers running Leopard on those old machines and many say without issue.

Based on your comments such as, "It has been suggested" and "huge slow downs I have heard occurs"; I wouldn't even be considering downgrading the OS until you have hands on experience with it yourself. That CPU probably doesn't multi-task too well, but that should be the case no matter which version OS X you have on it.

If you're going to put money into a 5 yr old PPC machine, my money would go toward maxing the RAM and a new hard drive if it still has the original 5 yr old 40 GB drive in it - long before I'd consider purchasing a copy of Tiger to downgrade it.

Thanks for your comments guys, last thing I want to do is upset any software installs/registrations etc. So this sounds like the best strategy to maintain continuity is to address base hardware issues... Would I be on the right track in this respect:-

a. Upgrade the ram to maximum - do I take it DDR400 1G stick would be the go as (I understand) the base machine has 512 Megs already and 1.5G is the max addressing capability ?

b. Find a larger (and faster) more recent hard drive or even a flash drive with same IDE/SCSI configuration...

This raises questions re the hard disk and installed software,

1. Is the base motherboard and disk I/O portion able to support a faster hard disk with improvements, in other words any existing latency in disk access - would that be the hard drive or the (motherboard) I/O to the CPU. If I get a faster hard disk would I be wasting money if the main latency is through the motherboard I/O bottleneck ?

2. Is there an equivalent disk to disk mapped copy type program (as from the PC environment), such that I could 'image' copy the whole hard disk to a newer faster drive and as far as the software is concerned nothing will appear to have changed - I would be using an external USB to IDE dongle to connect another hard disk ?

3. Is the hard disk connection in the laptop IDE or SCSI, I have an oldie mac laptop with an 80meg laptop drive that is SCSI but I guess Apple used IDE ?

Thanks from Perth,

Seems to me that if you were doing back ups to protect your valuable info this would not be an issue as you could reformat, load Tiger, and if it was no better then load your back up back onto the G4. Perhaps the best path is sort a long term back up strategy that gives peace of mind and room to make changes. Relying on one HD is a fairly high risk scene.

a. Yes

b. Yes

1. don't have the knowledge to answer that question

2. SuperDuper! will create a bootable clone which you could then use to replace the existing drive - that dongle should work to do that - but my understanding is that the G4 will only boot from a FW, not USB

3. Apple iBook G4/1.33 12-Inch (Mid-2005 - Op) Specs (iBook G4 - Mid-2005 - M9846LL/A) @ EveryMac.com will answer a lot of the hardware questions - a good site to have bookmarked

Getting there

Collin Bl said:

Seems to me that if you were doing back ups to protect your valuable info this would not be an issue as you could reformat, load Tiger, and if it was no better then load your back up back onto the G4. Perhaps the best path is sort a long term back up strategy that gives peace of mind and room to make changes. Relying on one HD is a fairly high risk scene.

Click to expand...

Its not the data I am concerned about Colin Bl, details in my first post...

Thats a great link bobtomay and appreciate your answers, not concerned about boot from USB, just looking for efficient way to temporarily attach another drive so I can clone the existing setup before considering acceding to my sons request we go back to 10.4 - suffice it to say i am getting him up to speed on aspects of it. I was an old CP/M os man, patched that for the Z80 and hard drive extensions many times.

btw: We attached a 80G external 3.5" drive via USB docking station and it came up as read only (it was fat32) yet the windows machine we wrote to it with previously sees it as r/w, couldnt find a way to tell the iBook we could write to it, yet we have admin logon etc...

Cant seem to find a 2.5" SSD with ATA interface, all seem to be Sata,

thanks

The iBook will write only via a Firewire connection. USB does not work so hot on Macs, even USB2.

harryb2448 said:

The iBook will write only via a Firewire connection. USB does not work so hot on Macs, even USB2.

Click to expand...

Rats, this was going to be real easy if I could have made it write the drive...

Tried to do a major copy via LAN and the machine became non-responsive, was the file table size exceeded ?

I should be able to do an image backup through the lan to another drive on say a PC machine or should I have a FTP server running on the destination backup as a better means than straight file copy etc ?

Thanks