10.3 17" PowerBook OS upgrade questions?

My sister has a 17" Aluminum PowerBook G4 that I am going to upgrade to Leopard. Currently it's running 10.3.9, 1.5 ghz G4, with 512 mb of ram. Is there anything I need to watch out for when updating to 10.5.x (Leopard)? I want to make sure she keeps all the programs, I don't want to lose anything. I will be using a full retail Leopard disk (Black box, Black disk with purple)

Her husband is saying that she may have a 4200 rpm drive and that it would slow the OS down to much. I don't have her serial number yet to look it up, but judging by the specs that she knows it looks like it may have come with a 5400 rpm drive. My argument with her is, she can hardly use it now because safari and firefox are so outdated that they don't work on most all webpages. And that she cant even sync her iPhone with it because iTunes is so outdated. And even if the hd slows it down a bit (which I dont think will affect it) its better than not being able to use it at all.

Does anyone have any experance with and older Mac ugrade to Leopard?

The hard drive will be fine, unless she is running out of space or is a heavy Photoshop user.

As for the upgrade. I have never had a problem, but you do have the option of an archive and install, this will upgrade the os and keep a copy of the old settings.

If you have a spare external drive you could also use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable clone of the old drive just in case - so you can restore 10.3 in the unlikely event that something goes wrong

louishen said:

The hard drive will be fine, unless she is running out of space or is a heavy Photoshop user.

As for the upgrade. I have never had a problem, but you do have the option of an archive and install, this will upgrade the os and keep a copy of the old settings.

If you have a spare external drive you could also use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable clone of the old drive just in case - so you can restore 10.3 in the unlikely event that something goes wrong

Click to expand...

She is a Photoshop user, but I'm pretty sure she uses company computers when doing that. I think she has such on old copy of Photoshop on it she doesn't use it for work related stuff. The laptop was the one she got when she went to school for being a graphic artist.

I do have any external hd that I was going to use to back up all her files. I will have to look into that Carbon Copy. Is it free? How long would it take to copy a typical drive?

Thanks

Carbon Copy Cloner is free, and how long it will take to copy a typical drive depends on what typical is, and if it is a firewire or USB drive.
It takes less than an hour to do around 100GB with a plain USB drive.

Thanks for the tips on Carbon Copy!

Are there any issues from going from 10.3 to 10.5? I want to be able to do just an upgrade, so I can keep all her programs. I know a clean install may be best...

A clean install is the best option.
The potential problems in upgrading is always incompatible software.
If you don't go the archive install option, then I would just do a clean install of the OS and any other software, and download the Leopard compatible applications from the vendors websites.
As for installing Leopard on that Mac, although it meets the min requirements, I would want to upgrade the RAM.