Old iMac, new Panther or Tiger?

[Texas04]

Well, im writing from a standpoint of not being able to buy a new mac every four years or so. Right now my neighbor, seeing my new interest in Mac's let me take hers home since she never uses it. Its an old iMac G3 400 MHZ~ with 640MB of ram. I am sick of not being able to watch H.264 video on Jaguar. So, Panther or Tiger would be the next step, but can my Mac handle that? Apple says it can, but will it run well? Or will it be slow like my old PC? ~sigh~

(A new computer will be eventually in the works soon!, yes a Mac)

 

[wordmunger]

Well, im writing from a standpoint of not being able to buy a new mac every four years or so. Right now my neighbor, seeing my new interest in Mac's let me take hers home since she never uses it. Its an old iMac G3 400 MHZ~ with 640MB of ram. I am sick of not being able to watch H.264 video on Jaguar. So, Panther or Tiger would be the next step, but can my Mac handle that? Apple says it can, but will it run well? Or will it be slow like my old PC? ~sigh~

(A new computer will be eventually in the works soon!, yes a Mac)

Panther will work great on that machine. I've got it running on an original G3 ibook (300 mhz, I think...) w/160 MB RAM. It's a little laggy, but works fine for web browsing, iTunes, etc. Your iMac has a faster video card and more memory. The only issue might be HD space -- has that been upgraded? 10 GB is probably fine, but much smaller than that and you may suffer performance issues.

 

[Texas04]

Well, I have 640MB of Ram, and my HD is about 12Gigs, with about 4 or 5 Free right now, I have an external drive where I save everything, 2 partions Fat32, to go back and fourth from my PC to the Mac, they are both about 30gigs,

 

[Jaffa Cake]

Just to follow up on what wordmunger posted, my previous Mac was a 500Mhz G3 iMac with 384MB of Ram and a 20GB hard disk, and that ran Panther beautifully – I'm sure that the iMac you describe will do so too.

One thing to mention... I remember reading that OS X likes to have about 4-5GB of hard drive space free (as you do at the moment) so it might be worthwhile just having a tidy of your files and apps, and freeing up a bit of space on the machine itself.

 

[Aliquis]

I have a friend running Tiger on his G3, and with enough ram (as you have) he says it runs faster than Panther.

It's amazing that with each release of OSX, it keeps getting faster and faster, while compared with Windows, each release kept getting more bloated and slower.

 

[slooksterPSV]

I have a friend running Tiger on his G3, and with enough ram (as you have) he says it runs faster than Panther.

It's amazing that with each release of OSX, it keeps getting faster and faster, while compared with Windows, each release kept getting more bloated and slower.

*Quotes a show/movie/something* That is going in my list of 'So there''s*End Quote*
I've put Tiger on my iBook (see the fine print (first one)) and it ran OK, not the best though. I went back to Panther, but I'm considering trying a new Installation of Tiger instead of making an image of it and doing it like that.

 

[Aliquis]

Let us know how it works out for you.

 

[MacFan782040]

Doesn't Tiger require a DVD drive?

 

[zen.state]

Doesn't Tiger require a DVD drive?

you can special order a cd version or do a target disk install over firewire from a mac with dvd.

I thought the G3 400 imacs all had dvd-rom's?

 

[California]

My vote is for Panther until they work the bugs out in the latest Tiger version. Though I think I would tell all my G3 imac pals (and I have quite a few, believe me) to stick with Panther until they have to finally give up these five year old machines. A few widgets and -- CPU hogging? I'm still on Panther on my new iBooks and PB.

 

[Aliquis]

what type of bugs do you mean?

 

[Texas04]

Installing Panther today:
I will see how it goes

 

[slooksterPSV]

Installing Panther today:
I will see how it goes

Good luck

 

[aquajet]

Its an old iMac G3 400 MHZ~ with 640MB of ram. I am sick of not being able to watch H.264 video on Jaguar.

You still won't be able to watch H.264 on that machine, regardless of what OS it has.