Monday, January 22, 2007

The oldest Mac you can run 10.4 on

Low End Mac's Charles W. Moore tells his tale of replacing a dead iMac with something that can run OS X 10.4. He rightly says that for older Macs, 10.3.9 works better, but if you absolutely must run 10.4, here's what you can run it on:

-- He recommends G4 Powerbooks and iBooks ... naturally.
-- The Mac Mini ... if you can get a cheap one.
-- A 750 MHz G4 iMac (available for about $350, he says ... and if that's the "lampshade" variety, I don't think you can get them that low)
-- 867 MHz "Quicksilver" Powermac G4 tower (about $550 sans monitor, he says)

He also has some software suggestions, including the gimmies (Thunderbird) along with AbiWord, Tex-Edit Plus and TextWrangler. Click over for links.

Moore also offers that at a minimum, he uses 10.3, since he never liked 10.2 and continued to use the Classic OS (9.2.2) until 10.3 "Tiger" came out. I'm a big fan of 10.3.9 and haven't seen the need, as yet to upgrade to 10.4 for the iBook G4.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

i use a b&w g3 , 300mhz, 512MB of RAM, very new 30/40 gig HD.

works fine with 10.4. wont play itunes videos, wont win any contests, wont do hot new 3d games, but i have used it well for many a month in web browsing, ebay, writing resume, that sort of thing.

Anonymous said...

itunes, ipod, etc.

on the other hand after plugging it into a bunch of usb stuff via a usb hub, and a usb kvm switch over with a windows machine, it will lock up randomly from time to time.

Unknown said...

10.3 is called Panther, 10.4 is called Tiger.

And though 10.3.9 is a very good OS, 10.4 beats it hands down...