Switch to Tiger, Leopard or stay?

I have a PowerPC G4 iMac with 768MB of RAM, runs at 800MHZ, 8.51 GB of HDD Memory and running 10.3.9.I want to switch to Tiger or Leopard. Tell me which one I should do or tell me if you thick I should stay?

Well, you can run Tiger quite happily on that machine (I did), but it would struggle with Leopard to be honest.
Tiger is very nice, and worth the upgrade, but only if you can pick it up cheaply to be honest in my opinion.

I would go with Tiger on that machine. 10.3 Panther is getting old. No new apps in a while support Panther and Safari is really bad, the Firefox versions that still work in Panther are old also. Tiger is a great upgrade for a machine like yours.

Dalek8325 said:

I have a PowerPC G4 iMac with 768MB of RAM, runs at 800MHZ, 8.51 GB of HDD Memory and running 10.3.9.I want to switch to Tiger or Leopard. Tell me which one I should do or tell me if you thick I should stay?

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Your G4 iMac has an 800mhz CPU. The minimum CPU speed for Leopard is supposed to be 867mhz. I'm not sure if this means that 10.5 will not install, or if this just means that it will run slowly.

So as already suggested...OS 10.4 Tiger would be a better choice...which you can update to 10.4.11.

Hope this helps,

- Nick

Pigoo, it actually will refuse to install on anything less than an 867Mhz G4. There is a hack to make it install but it's so slow on lesser machines it's not worth it. DVD player in 10.5 wants a 1.5Ghz G4 to even play DVD's decently. Tiger is the way to go on the G4 macs.

dtravis7 said:

Pigoo, it actually will refuse to install on anything less than an 867Mhz G4. There is a hack to make it install but it's so slow on lesser machines it's not worth it. DVD player in 10.5 wants a 1.5Ghz G4 to even play DVD's decently. Tiger is the way to go on the G4 macs.

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Thanks for clarifying! With all of the Mac's I have I simply never really tried installing 10.5 on a Mac with a CPU slower than 867mhz.

I know sometimes software packages have minimum system requirements...but even then sometimes they will still install on "lesser" machines...they just won't run very well.

Thanks again for the clarification...good to know!

- Nick

I did it just to see what would happen and even tried the hack to make it think it was a 867 Mhz G4 on a Digital Audio 667Mhz G4. Pretty slow. Just doing basic things is not that bad but forget any video on the web. Total Slideshow!

dtravis7 said:

Total Slideshow!

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Slideshows are no fun...especially if it's supposed to be a video!

- Nick

I run Tiger on ours with no problem...have not even thought about Leopard for it.