Upgrading OS X 10.3 on an eMac

The eMac is:

1 GHz PowerPC G4 CPU
640 MB RAM
OS X 10.3.9

Usage is web, email, light word processing.

Upgrading to 10.4 Tiger should be no problem, as the specs of the machine well exceed min. requirements. The machine exceeds min. specs for 10.5 Leopard, but not by much.

My inclination would be to buy a used 10.4 Tiger disk and upgrade, but skip 10.5.

The eMac is my very non-tech Dad's. While I have some experience with Macs and OS X, my knowledge is more in the Windows and Linux realm.

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

Thanks,

jbarntt

In your place i would do the change to Tiger, with that G4 it should be a nice improvement. Leopard has a lot of gee whizz features that will not add much to your Dads G4. Make sure u get this disk not the grey ones;


Click for full size

Thanks Collin,

Am I correct in assuming I need a Tiger disk as would've been sold by Apple stand alone, rather than one that came with a particular system ?

jbarntt

Just checked and the drive should be OK - M8950LL/A shipped with a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive that "reads DVDs at up to 8x speed, writes CD-R discs at up to 32x speed, writes CD-RW discs at up to 10x speed, [and] reads CDs at up to 32x speed", and M8951LL/A shipped with a DVD-R/CD-RW SuperDrive that "writes DVD-R discs at up to 4x speed, reads DVDs at up to 8x speed, writes CD-R discs at up to 16x speed, writes CD-RW discs at up to 8x speed, [and] reads CDs at up to 32x speed."

A disk that came with a G4 laptop may not install on a emac whereas the one in the pic will install on either unit. But you will have to do the on line update to 10.4.11 best deal download the Combo update. Here - Apple - Downloads - Mac OS X Updates - Mac OS X 10.4.11 Combo Update (PPC)

Thanks Collin,

I think You've given me the info I need.

Best Regards,

jbarntt

P.S. - I'd like to visit NZ someday, supposed to be a great place.