Powerbook g4 updgrade question

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Hello all, I am new to Mac's and recently my sister gave me her old mac powerbook g4 15inch. I replaced the hard drive and upgraded the RAM to 2gb. The issue however....i reinstalled the cd's it came with which was mac os x 10.3, and I was looking to purchase Leopard (10.5) and I was just wondering that if I purchase 10.5 that I could just install it over the old version 10.3 without having to upgrade to 10.4 first. The laptop meets all the hardware requirements for installation of 10.5, I just want to make sure I will not have a problem if i install it over 10.3. Thank you for you help!
 
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I think Leopard is only to be used if you have Tiger installed.

Are you sure you'd want Leo on your PB, it's a heavy OS for a G4 CPU, even with the 2GB's.
And if you're going through with it... always back-up first.

Good luck
 

pigoo3

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Yes you can install 10.5 without having 10.4. But one of the requirements is that your computer have at least an 867mhz processor...you didn't mention what speed your Powerbook CPU is (although you did mention that your laptop meets the hardware requirements for 10.5).

Here's what Apple says as well:

Requirements for Mac OS X v10.5

But as Sur3Mac mentioned...depending on your Powerbook's CPU speed...10.5 may or may not be a performance improvement. But you will be able to take advantage of the improvements with 10.5 such as Time Machine...among other enhancements.

Hope this helps,

- Nick
 
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I'd create a bootable clone via CCC, and make sure it works.
 
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G'day matty and welcome to the forums.

As Nick has advised, it all depends on the speed of your G4 and G4's if above the 1GHz mark will run Leopard very nicely with your memory, and you do not have to install Tiger first.

As you now have a spare HDD, pop it in an external case and use for backups. Being a G4 look for a Firewire connecting external , as generally G4s will not boot from an external USB, even USB2. drive as USB is simply too slow.

You can as suggested use CCC or SuperDuper for backing up.
 
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For what it's worth, YES you can install it on top of 10.3... you can also run it with 2GB of RAM for sure, assuming the processor speed is over 867MHz. But I'm assuming if your system is capable of fitting 2GB of RAM it must be one of the later powerbook models with a processor of 1GHz or faster.

I also have an eMac running 10.5 with 512MB of RAM and a 1.25GHz processor. It works flawlessly.
 

pigoo3

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it all depends on the speed of your G4 and G4's if above the 1GHz mark will run Leopard very nicely with your memory, and you do not have to install Tiger first.

I have 10.5 on a 933mhz Powermac G4...and it seems to run it ok...in fact I'm not really sure it seems any different than 10.4 (although I haven't run any benchmarking software to confirm).

But definitely no You-Tube!!!;)

We get those questions here about, "Why does You-Tube run so slow on my G4"...so I thought that I would remind myself;)...man what a mess!:(

It was absolutely a disaster trying to run You-Tube on a 933mhz G4 (I think it has the stock NVIDIA GeForce4 MX video card).

- Nick
 
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If you ugrade to Leo, please let us, (or me for that matter) know what you think of performance on your machine.

Personally I think Leo runs like a brick, on my wifes PB 1,25GHz, 1GB.
 

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