Upgrading OS on G3 iMac...

pod


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A friend has a G3 iMac; 600mhz, 512mb ram. It is bootable between OS 9.2.2 and OSX 10.1. Up until now they've been happy with OS9 but now want to use the OSX. Is the software upgrade to 10.3.9 free, or do you have to purchase it? Thanks
 
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A friend has a G3 iMac; 600mhz, 512mb ram. It is bootable between OS 9.2.2 and OSX 10.1. Up until now they've been happy with OS9 but now want to use the OSX. Is the software upgrade to 10.3.9 free, or do you have to purchase it? Thanks

They will have to pay for an upgrade to 10.3.x

I would recommend they actually upgrade to Tiger, rather than Panther because Apple have a history of only supporting the current and previous version of the OS, so with Leopard imminent, Panther might find itself quickly unsupported.

Having said that, if they've been happy using OS 9 all this time, OS X 10.3 might do fine.
 
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Thanks zoolook... would the G3 iMac (spec above) be able to handle Tiger? The iMac will only be used for emailing/surfing/itunes/msn.
 
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Based on my recent experience with a G3 iMac with only 333 Mhz, I can say with certainty that it will be able to handle Panther. I do all of those things with my old iMac and, with a few performance tweaks, it runs great. I can't really say if Tiger will run since I haven't tried it, but Panther will for sure.
 
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Can you go on youtube and watch videos without them being choppy? becuase I cant on my G3. It's a 500mhz with 256mb of ram and an 80gb hard drive.
 
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Tiger runs fine on an old G3. I installed it one of our machines the other week - it works with no problems.
 
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Can you go on youtube and watch videos without them being choppy? becuase I cant on my G3. It's a 500mhz with 256mb of ram and an 80gb hard drive.

One thing needs to be said here: you will need to add lots more RAM so you can enjoy your user experience. Otherwise it'll either lag and drag crazily for the most mundane tasks or it'll crash when it won't be able to answer demands by apps or the system.
 
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17 inch 2 GHz C2D imac (5,1) with 3GB DDR2 RAM, X1600 (128MB memory) GPU - OSX 10.6.3
One thing needs to be said here: you will need to add lots more RAM so you can enjoy your user experience. Otherwise it'll either lag and drag crazily for the most mundane tasks or it'll crash when it won't be able to answer demands by apps or the system.

Actually I have a 333mhz with the same ram. And apart from movies (youtube included and a big offender) my machine still purs along. Sure it lags a little when I use photoshop with 5 or 6 other apps running. But on the whole it runs great. And I've had like one app crash each 6 months at most. But I will say more ram will make the machine so much more a joy to use. That's why I'm soon upgrading.
 

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