Which operating system?

I've just treated my mother in law to a second hand iMac G3 500 ghz with 35 gig hard drive, 256mb ram running Jaguar 10.2.8

I was thinking of upgrading the operating system but as it is second hand I don't have the original OS X Jaguar disks or OS 9 disk either so i don't want to try and put Tiger on it and screw it up.

So will this Mac be able to run Tiger succssfully or do i get Panther of ebay or should I just stick with Jaguar?

Many thanks in advance,

James

Since it's a 500Mhz I am sure it has Firewire ports which Tiger wants to be able to install as well as a DVD ROM. With 256 Megs RAM I would go with Panther instead of Tiger unless you upgrade it to at least 512Megs RAM. Jaguar is a bit old and you can't get a newer version of Safari and a few other apps. I would say as is go with Panther.

IMO: Tiger makes some technical improvements over Panther but most of the "advances" are eye candy and older hardware cannot use things like Core Video. Panther would give her a stable, useable machine with the setup you have. (If you want to be nice - maybe for Mother's Day - get some more RAM for it. All versions of X like RAM.)