I'm pretty happy with my stripey cat powered G4 933 iBook, but I should ask, is anybody using Leopard on older G4s in the 800 to 1200Mhz range?

If so, how's the performance? Better? Worse? Is it worth the money, time and effort?

I'm looking forward to when I eventually move up to an Intel Mac and get Leopard natively installed, but it'd be interesting to know if it's worth the move on the older hardware in the meantime.

I'm a pretty heavy Garage Band and iWork user, but also tax Final Cut Express pretty heavily when I use it, too.

I have installed it on an ibook 1.2ghz. It seems to be faster than tiger. Apps open quicker. It takes a little longer to boot up than before, but once it is up, i would say it is quicker than tiger.

same on my mac pro, longer boot up time , but super quick after that.

I miss the welcome to macintosh screen, instead I get a blue screen then the desktop.

I have leopard running on my 1Ghz 17" Powerbook with 1.5GB ram.
No problems at all however it does have a 64MB graphics card as opposed to a 32mb in an ibook.
But i'm sure it'll run just fine.

On G4s exceeding the basic Leopard requirements (867Mhz, Quartz Extreme video card, 512MB RAM), it appears to perform just as well as Tiger.

When you start to fiddle with this however - hacking Leopard to install on slower G4s, or on a "borderline" graphics card and minimal RAM - it will be slower than Tiger (machines that previously were quite usable and responsive). From what I've read graphics performance is the main thing the suffers on such machines, due to higher reliance on Core Image and Core Animation.

JB

A Mate of mine installed Leopard on her 1Ghz iBook G4 with no problems at all, I'd have installed it on my 1gz eMac but I don't have enough ram!

You need atleast 512M IIRC

Cool, thanks guys. I have 640M of RAM, which is just better than the minimum, I might just start thinking about it. Anybody using Garage Band extensively on this sort of rig?

I've put Leopard server on my Sawtooth, bit on the slow side, but not too bad.

I'd be pumping up RAM to the max.
If I recall correctly, on my 1Gig iBook, with something like 5 or 6 tracks in GB it would complain with 768Mb of RAM. When I pumped it up to 1.25Gig I'm pretty sure the problem went away.
This was a while back though when my young bloke used to muck around with GB, so don't quote me.

mutters

I'd have to agree here Mutters. Any version of OSX just loves Ram and the older the model desktop or PB the more you should throw extra memory at it.

Stewie

I've got Leopard on a 1.42 Mini with a gig of RAM. Runs pretty well.

I was going to have a rant about "minimum video cards", as it's something I've always HATED about PCs... Well to run XYZ you need to have at least an HDY video card but preferrably a JRX one, and a EID74 sound card..... whereas with Macs it's - Well, you need at least a Mac Classic II with at least 2Mb RAM, and that pretty much told you what you needed right there.

But then Firefox crashed on me, so I wont rant about it.

I'm considering Leopard now that I've got an extra 512Mb of RAM on its way (doubling what I have) for my eMac G4 1.25Hz machine. It has an ATI Radeon 9200 card... *shrug?*

Leopard runs like a champ on my G4 mini with 512 mem.

iBook 1.07Ghz 768MB Ram running leopard fine. Takes slightly longer to boot but other than that I dare say it runs slightly quicker. Final Cut Pro is still running fine too - I expected not to have enough RAM after the upgrade!

Hmm, if the consensus is a gig of RAM, that leaves me out, because my iBook maxes out at 640MB (128 onboard and 512 SODIMM) Guess if it aint broke, don't fix it

Thanks all, much appreciated, this site is an awesome resource.

You do know that you can put 2 gigs of ram in your emac. And a 512 and 1024 will run happily side by side.