I've been trying to find out but have been unable to come up with any real substantive info.

Here's the deal. I have a friend that has a PowerBook 5300cs. He's running system 7.5.3. I'd love to see him upgrade to at least OS 8, however, I can't find out the minimum hardware requirements.

He has a 750 meg HD, and 65 meg (so he says) of RAM.

Does anyone either know where I can dig for this info, or know the answer outright? I appreciate all help.

Thanks,
Ciam

[macman]

That should work just fine for 8.1. I've heard that OS 8.1 works great on 5300 laptops. The minimum Ram req for OS 8 is 24MB but realistically 40MB is the minimum. as far as HD space, as long as he doesn't have it filled up with junk and has about 100MB left he should be fine. Make sure you run some utility on that thing before upgrading though, Norton, TechToolPro, or at the very least Disk First Aid.

We used to have several 5300's on site, and they all were upgraded to 8.1. I would stick with 8.1 due to it's low memory requirements

Thank you!

I am running 8.6 on mine and have been for awhile. I have only 32 MB RAM, and it runs fine.

I am running 8.1 on my 5300cs w/64M RAM, and I think it is the best OS for this system. I tinkered with 8.6, but it was way too slow. The 5300s were never speed deamons, but with 8.6 it was painful. 8.1 has a fairly small footprint, and allows you to run with VM off. Which seems to make a lot of difference, because the Hard drives in these things are REALLY SLOW!

Originally posted by ciam:
I've been trying to find out but have been unable to come up with any real substantive info.

Here's the deal. I have a friend that has a PowerBook 5300cs. He's running system 7.5.3. I'd love to see him upgrade to at least OS 8, however, I can't find out the minimum hardware requirements.

He has a 750 meg HD, and 65 meg (so he says) of RAM.

Does anyone either know where I can dig for this info, or know the answer outright? I appreciate all help.

Thanks,
Ciam

Personally, I think Mac OS 8+ on a 5300 is too slow but that is just my personnal taste. I'd stick with Mac OS 7.6.1 which is a bit more reliable than any Mac OS 8 release (in my experience) and is also speedier, not to mention the lower memory requirements. But you don't get the multitasking finder with system 7, though.

One more tip: whatever version of the OS you choose to install, it would be a good idea to install a brand-new system folder instead of updating the existing one. Every major OS upgrade usually becomes my occasion to do a complete spring cleaning of the hard drive and refreshing of the system folder.

[P]

I think 8.6 would be the best, mainly because of the fact that it uses much less power than older systems. Also depends a bit on what you want to do with it, as 8.6 requires a bit more RAM.

I run 8.1 on a 5300c with 40MB of RAM it runs great. I thyought 8.5-8.6 was to bloated and slow for my 5300. I also suggest it for most PPC under 100 mhz(especially anything with a 601 chip). Ialso suggest RAM doubler just for the Memory mapping option-not as a replacement for virtual memory. This way your applications require less memory but you don't use Apples VM or RAM doublers'VM which keeps using your hard drive as a scratch disk for virtual memory-this won;t run the battery down as fast.

I am running MacOS 9.0.4 on my Mac Duo 2300. (It is actually a 230 which had the motherboard upgrade). I have a 1.1 GB HD and 56 MB of RAM. The machine is very stable and fairly fast. Only problem I've seen is with AppleWorks 6.0.4, which is still too darn slow.

I am unaware of any reason not to use MacOS 9.0.4 on a 5300 with 60+ megs of RAM. It should work just fine, although I haven't tried it. If you are going to upgrade, get Conflict Catcher 8, download the latest upgrade from cassady&green, then do a clean install of the system, followed by CC8, then the CC8 upgrade, then do a system merge. Do not attempt to install MacOS 9 on top of 8.1. The machine will almost certainly crash after restart if you try to install 9.0.4 directly on top of anything prior to 8.5.

[wlonh]

CC's system merge feature has been reported as suspect... it is strongly suspected to lead to a system slowdown over a fairly short period of time in some instances... this was reported recently at MacInTouch and MacFixit and likely other sites as well...

YOUR mileage may vary and then again it might not less is often more, DIY and you have no one to blame but yourself...

i scratch my head when i read of people using CC anyway... i have not had an extension conflict since System 7 days and i have a hard time understanding why all the Macs that i casually oversee (not a really large number but diverse enough, and a casual effort is all it takes!) have no need for it either... and one of those Macs is owned by a 76 year-old man (a beige G3 266 DT) who is a photog and has peripherals galore, i keep his Mac running right by answering his occasional email and i've helped him through every upgrade from 8.0 to present 9.04 by just using emails and not very extensive use at that...

so why am i saying all this? because if a 76 year-old man doesn't need any of that third-party handholding software then nobody does...

so there, nyah

I, too, have seen little need for CC. I can do what it does manually, if necessary, but usually suspect extensions are fairly obvious.

As far as OS 9 goes, I found it too bloated and slow on my PowerComputing PowerCenter Pro 180 (overclocked to ~200) with 220 meg of RAM. I use 8.6. I wouldn't advise OS9 unless you have a G3 or better. But again, as was just stated, your mileage may vary. :-)

The 8.1 advice here makes the most sense to me, and that is what I'll advise my friend do.

-ciam