[iREZ]

My girlfriend is going overseas in the summer and needs a laptop to do some homwork, papers, etc... My generous cousin gave me his old iBook for her to use. It's a g3 300MHz with 160MB RAM and a 3gig HD. My question is if there will be added performance if I just installed OS X instead of 10.2 or 10.3. All shes going to be using it for is Word, Internet, and E-mail. Any suggestons will be appreciated.

[discotronic]

Originally posted by iREZ:
My girlfriend is going overseas in the summer and needs a laptop to do some homwork, papers, etc... My generous cousin gave me his old iBook for her to use. It's a g3 300MHz with 160MB RAM and a 3gig HD. My question is if there will be added performance if I just installed OS X instead of 10.2 or 10.3. All shes going to be using it for is Word, Internet, and E-mail. Any suggestons will be appreciated.

I would go with Panther and the smallest install possible. OS 9 would be ok but the stability just isn't there. Jaguar should run ok but Panther would definately speed things up a bit. I could tell the difference between Panther and Jag on an iBook 700. Panther did things faster as far as the system goes.

I have a friend who has a Blueberry iBook running Panther. He upgraded from Jag and according to him there is a big difference. I'm not sure how well the iBook will run with a 3 Gig HD and only 160MB RAM. Good luck.

[iREZ]

Thanks, I have a feeling I'm going to need it (or atleast my girlfriend).

[RadarBob2]

discotronic;
can you elaborate on "there is a big difference".


I've had OS X on my Rev A iBook for the better part of a year. I have 10.2.8, not Panther.

I've not seen a performance improvement in the OS 10.2.x "series". As for Panther I rationalized that many of the new features - for example Expose, which is really cool - simply are not suppored on our iBook model. We don't have the graphics card/memory for it. Of course that means I'm not getting the "quartz extreme" advantage now either. IMHO, Panther is a total waste of money for this iBook.

Of course OS X is slower than OS 9, which was slower than OS 8.5 which was slower than OS 7.5, which was slower than OS 7.0... Get it? Why would Panther be any different on the Rev A iBook. I dare anyone to prove Panther is as fast as OS 9.

After all that negativity I must say I'm using OS X.

• I really like the dock.
• I like the non-modal dialog boxes (notice how you no longer have to dismiss the open dialog (for example) in order to goto another app / do something else?).
• I like the infinitely adjustable icon sizing on the desktop.
• I like the seemless, whatever-the-OS-does, when I go from airport to 'hard wire' simply by plugging in the ethernet cable.
• I love that my older version of Quicken runs just fine in classic mode.

The Original 3.2GB HD is not enough
Yeah, some folks are actually getting by with the original HD, but I really don't know how. I guess they really have to get REAL lean. The OS X install takes about 1.5GB itself! Since you did it, I guess it's OK. but for me, now that I have a 40GB drive, I download and install at a frenzied pace and space is just not an issue.

Apps on OS X
Apple's email client. Sloooowwww. Just be aware and accept it. It's even slow on our 700MHz iBook. Seems that every time you click on something just about, it's reindexing. Fortunately NO OTHER app is slow like this. I tolerate it because I want to use OS X. Yes, I've used other email clients (GyzaMail) but a slight improvement at best.

Safari Clearly faster than all other browsers I've tried (NS, IE, FireFox). Sometimes I run into problems w/ web sites, I suspect that Safari is much more compliant to current web standards and some of the "fast and loose" web-slinging going on gives it problems. In particular I sometimes cannot submit an on-line form (like ordering something) w/ safari. So I just open IE or whatever to do it.

[ginoledesma]

Jaguar will do fine, though space will really be your primary issue.

If her demands for work isn't at all that high, then Mac OS 9 will do. It will definitely outpeform any iteration of Mac OS X, and RAM is more than adequate. Mac OS 9 stability isn't at all that bad if you're doing the basic stuff. Sure you won't be able to multitask as easily, but neither would you really be able to do so comfortably when running Mac OS X given the limited resources.

Mac OS 9 + Mozilla + MS Word will be just fine. And she'll have ample space to work with.

[sniffer]

I agree with the above, stay with Mac OS 9. The biggest issue isn't the cpu, but the disk space and the amount of ram. OS X needs a lot of free hard drive space to play on to run fluidy.

Originally posted by RadarBob2:
As for Panther I rationalized that many of the new features - for example Expose, which is really cool - simply are not suppored on our iBook model. We don't have the graphics card/memory for it.

Quartz handle Expos� very well, so that's not an issue.

If you decide to go with OS X, I'll recommend Panther if you can. I found it to be much more solid and I also found it to feel a bit snappier (not much, but enough that I don't want to go back) on my G3 iBook. It seems like low-end machines simply runs better with Panther compared with Jaguar.
Good luck.

[discotronic]

Originally posted by RadarBob2:
discotronic;
can you elaborate on "there is a big difference".

According to my friend there is a big difference on his iBook. I asked him this afternoon and here is some of the things he mentioned:

The overall performance of Panther (not other programs) is better than Jag. A couple things that comes to mind is the Disk Utility and iTunes. It takes about half the time to open them. The "finder" is easier to navigate and boot up time seems shorter.

Safari 1.2 is more reliable which you can't get with 10.2. I haven't had it quit on me yet. Older versions of Safari did it to me all the time.

I agree with sniffer. On low end machines Panther seems to perform better than Jag. I could tell the same with my G3 iBook. I couldn't tell much of a difference with my G4 iMac.

[Hanul]

The 3.2GB will be allright. You can strip down Panther a lot: Just leave out the BSD subsystem, all the foreign languages (and the fonts for them), the printer drivers, X11 etc.

I installed Panther on a 6GB HDD with Office v.X and there are still 5GB left.

[iREZ]

I just put in Jaguar, I'd keep it in OS9 if I could but I dont have Word for OS9 (I dont even think there is Word for OS9) and she's not into Appleworks all too much. Oh well, beggers cant be choosers right? It does work but painfully slow, at least to anything I'm used to.

[QuadG5Man]

As great as Panther is the iBook you're running is a fairly slow G3, or should I say very slow?

300 MHz G3 and 160 megs of RAM is NOT enough to run Panther or Jag.

I'd be running 9.1 natively on the iBook as I suspect it would be a far superior computing experience.

I think Panther is biting off more than that iBook will chew. But what do I know? I've never tried it.

If you had an IceBook G3 at 500+ MHz and 384 megs of RAM I'd say go with Panther. But you just missed the 'tech cutoff'. Stick with OS 9.

But if you bought a 5400-7200 RPM 60 gig internal hard drive and doubled the ram.....

IMHO

best of luck

Keatman

[ginoledesma]

MS Office came out waaaaaay before Mac OS X, so its only natural that MS Office is available for Mac OS 9.x. The last version you can get for Mac OS X is MS Office 2001, which is still up-to-date even by today's standards, capable of opening documents created in MS Office XP for Windows. I'm not sure if its able to open MS Office 2003 documents, though, since it has something like DRM in it.

On anything less than a G4/400, I'd really stick with Mac OS 9.x if you're going to do anything more than surfing, email, and [basic] word processing. Its not that Mac OS 9.x is a bad system, anyhow.