[anim8ing]

Hey all, I'm planning on picking up an iBook 300 or 366 for my wife to use for school work, and was wondering how it runs X. I had a tangerine iBook last year, but OSX was just in the beta stages. My question for all of you out there is how does 10.1.x run on the older iBooks ? Increasing the ram to 320 will help a little i'm sure, but is it usable, or would you suggest sticking with OS 9. Any info is appreciated.

Thanks,
Anim8r

[dante]

Yep, It'll run it, but it'll be as slow as a legless dog that's trying to climb a ladder.
Stick with 9.

[reddwarfsmeghead]

Originally posted by dante:
<STRONG>Yep, It'll run it, but it'll be as slow as a legless dog that's trying to climb a ladder.
Stick with 9.</STRONG>

I've been running OS X on my iBook rev "a" 300Mhz 160Mb since 10.0.3 and I'm now running 10.1.3. I must admit that it is not as fast as on my iMac DV 450 but unless you wanted to play games or run clasic apps on a regular basis. then OS X is the way to go


~~~~
Fun, Fun, Fun in the Sun, Sun, Sun
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[SpeedRacer]

slow as a legless dog that's trying to climb a ladder

Man... took the words right out of my mouth (well, ok not exactly)

Dual USB iBook/500mHz/256RAM/v10.1.3 & v9.1 here.

There is no comparison, 9.1 feels quick, nimble, and responsive.
10.1 feels sluggish, heavy, and nonresponsive to user input.

And this in on a 1 year old machine.

I've installed and run X on several different types of machines since day one and i still wouldn't dream of using OS X on anything but a G4 with g4mx2/Radeon and 384+ MB of RAM. The sad truth of X is that the Aqua GUI was built around the Altivec-enhanced g4 and as a result just devours non-Altivec enhanced CPUs (g3 processors) for lunch. Not to mention the fact that Office X (relative to Office 01') is about as fast as that legless dog trying to climb a rope covered in butter (to continue the vivid imagery).

I would not even dream of putting X on a machine with a pre-Rage128 graphics card which (you should be aware) will be running with little-no hardware graphics acceleration (see Apple's announcement on refusal to support RagePro/LT GPUs approx 1 mo ago).

Speed

[seanyepez]

If you're going to get that slow of a machine, OS 9 is truly your only option. The iBook will run OS X, but it will feel like the public beta. You will seriously think there is a debugger running.

[mikerally]

I have both a Tangerine Rev/A iBook, and an Indigo Firewire iBook.

The original iBook, is quite usable under Mac OS X if you max out the RAM to 320MB. You can get away with web browsing and running Microsoft Office on it.

If you have the opportunity though, go for an iBook with FireWire, like my Indigo. Because the video card is fully supported in Mac OS X, there is a massive boost in performance, it runs so well I can get away with running DivX movies full screen to the point where my friends can't even acknowledge that there are any performance problems (I can see a frame or two drop during heavy duty action scenes) - MPEG1 files play flawlessly on it at full screen - this is a G3 366Mhz I'm talking about here - the icebreaker in performance is the the video card my friend and all Firewire Macs have at least the 8MB ATI RAGE PRO which makes a world of a difference!!!!

[Gametes]

Well most MacNN readers are sophisticated users and thus have quite demanding expectations...I, on the other hand, use my Blueberry iBook (300MHz, 288MB) to:

• Surf the net and do email (OmniWeb and Mail)
• Do homework (Appleworks and ProjectBuilder)
• Entertain myself (iTunes and Fire)

...among other, even less important uses . The moral to this story is that I use OS X -- without Classic even installed -- and if you or anyone like you is intending to use a machine like mine for purposes like mine, OS X is just fine.
In fact, kinda fun.

[nest18]

Originally posted by SpeedRacer:
<STRONG>

Man... took the words right out of my mouth (well, ok not exactly)

Dual USB iBook/500mHz/256RAM/v10.1.3 & v9.1 here.

There is no comparison, 9.1 feels quick, nimble, and responsive.
10.1 feels sluggish, heavy, and nonresponsive to user input.

And this in on a 1 year old machine.

Speed</STRONG>

I have the same configuration as you but i have 384 of RAM and it makes A BIG DIFERENCE. I've red soo much people complaning that i've wait until last week to install os 10.1.2 on my iBook and frankly there is a lot on bashing over here .... I mean if you are a power user that push the machine to the limit yes obviously you'll need more power ... but those people have a G4 ... I'm soo tired of hearing misinformation on this forum

my 2 cents

[Arkham_c]

I had an original tangerine iBook/300 with 160 MB of RAM when OSX came out. Bear in mind I never had 10.1 with its speed improvements. However, OSX ran reasonably well on it as long as I did not boot classic. Classic would eat all the free RAM up and slow the machine to a crawl.

If you're a casual user and don't mind running OSX on an 800x600 screen (which is VERY small for OSX), the older iBooks should do alright.