Powerbook G4 1.5Ghz - Tiger or Leopard?

I think I'm going to keep this 12" Powerbook G4 1.5Ghz I have lying around as I really like the size of it compared to the Macbooks and it's not a complete slouch (yet). It came with Tiger, but I also have a family pack of Leopard, so I was wondering which do you think would be better at this point. I've heard that early Leopard versions (10.5.1 etc.), weren't very Powerbook friendly compared to Tiger, but I'm not sure if it's improved much since. I'm actually on it right now using Leopard, but I was just wondering what you guys thought would be a better choice in the long term.

Also, I've maxed out the memory at 1.25GB, so it's pretty much as fast of a 12" Powerbook as I'm going to find. I just wish it had a dual layer Superdrive instead of just a regular burner, but I can't really complain .

I voted Leopard. Why go to an older OS if the newer one works just fine?

Considering all of the little features apple adds to each version I'd go with Leopard. I just don't think you will see that much of a difference if any going back to tiger.

The only thing about the PowerBook with Leopard is you won't get all the goodies that it has for the Intel Macs (e.g. Bootcamp or Front Row). It makes more sense for you to use Leopard over Tiger so you're not behind when Snow Leopard comes out.

Cowcaster88 said:

The only thing about the PowerBook with Leopard is you won't get all the goodies that it has for the Intel Macs (e.g. Bootcamp or Front Row). It makes more sense for you to use Leopard over Tiger so you're not behind when Snow Leopard comes out.

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I've heard Snow Leopard is dropping support for PPC processors. Not sure if that was just a rumor of if it was true.

I'd go ahead and put Leopard on it. I'm typing this on my Powerbook G4 1.67ghz that's running 10.5.7, and it's running great, no complaints whatsoever. I think it's as fast as Tiger was, because it originally had 10.4.11 on it when I purchased it.

Cowcaster88 said:

The only thing about the PowerBook with Leopard is you won't get all the goodies that it has for the Intel Macs (e.g. Bootcamp or Front Row). It makes more sense for you to use Leopard over Tiger so you're not behind when Snow Leopard comes out.

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Front Row works on PPC.

Abit667 said:

Front Row works on PPC.

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Yeah, I was gonna say that I thought I had Front Row on Tiger on my PPC 20" iMac.

yeah I got Front Row to work on my iBook as well but I was thinking without the remote its not the same.

Why not create a disk image of your current install, update to Leopard, and test it. I suspect you're worried about performance. If so I wouldn't be. Apple does a surprisingly good job at keeping older platforms appear snappy. I think this is one of the reasons Apple machine retain their value longer.

BTW I run 10.4 on my Powerbook, 15"/1.5ghz/2gig, just for legacy development and testing. If it weren't for that it would be running 10.5.

Run's like crap. I have a 15" PB 1.5ghz 1.5gb ram and a 17" 1.67ghz. Both run like crap with leopard. Maybe it isn't noticeable to everyone, but I certainly noticed the slowdown in launching applications and opening finder. It just was not as quick as Tiger.

Don't even think about using coverflow on the old g4 powerbooks, not worth it. If you upgrade, take the advice of one of the other posters and create an image. I guarantee you'll be staying with 10.4.11 unless you only want to run 1-2 applications at a time.

The G4 is an aging platform, way too slow for leopard.

Syndication said:

Run's like crap. I have a 15" PB 1.5ghz 1.5gb ram and a 17" 1.67ghz. Both run like crap with leopard. Maybe it isn't noticeable to everyone, but I certainly noticed the slowdown in launching applications and opening finder. It just was not as quick as Tiger.

Don't even think about using coverflow on the old g4 powerbooks, not worth it. If you upgrade, take the advice of one of the other posters and create an image. I guarantee you'll be staying with 10.4.11 unless you only want to run 1-2 applications at a time.

The G4 is an aging platform, way too slow for leopard.

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Agreed.

As much as people say Leopard runs fine with G4s, in my opinion and feel, it feels sluggish whereas Tiger feels really fast on the G4s. It makes it feel like its still a current gen notebook. The most convenient/useful app that Leopard has that Tiger doesnt is Time Machine since everyone hates to back up, but Time Machine does it for you all by itself. However, Super Duper can do the same thing.

Well, I've run benchmarks with Tiger and Leopard, and they both seem about the same. But, I am a major advocate of the fact that benchmarks aren't real world, but in everyday applications, I don't notice any slowdown using Firefox, VLC, Quicktime, Office etc. Using iMovie, it's definitely slower than my Intel iMac, but, DUH! I don't think that the sluggishness has anything to do with the software, it's a PowerPC processor, which admittedly, is dated.



I personally think that Leopard runs fine on the faster G4s. The low-end G4s, such as 1ghz and below seem very sluggish, but anything faster than 1Ghz seems plenty snappy for my tastes. No, it's not going to be as fast as an Intel, but what do you really expect?

I just switched back to Tiger on it and it seems much snappier. The real world test for me is if it is sluggish when it's hooked up to an external monitor. It seemed like I had pretty bad input lag under Leopard using it in clamshell mode. I'll test it out after I get all the software updates.

Well, it doesn't seem like Tiger is any better under clamshell mode than Leopard, so I guess I'll stick with Leopard. I'll probably just end up getting a Macbook here soon. Oh well.

I dunno, I have the latest leopard installed on my RBG4 with 1.33GHz processor and 2GB of RAM and leopard runs just fine. I do not really notice any slowdown compared to Tiger. I run the PBG4 with dual displays- the built in laptop display and a 22" Dell 2209WA in portrait mode.

I use a 20" C2D (2.4GHz, 4GB RAM) iMac at work and comparing the speed of that vs my PBG4 at home it seems like each runs the OS more or less the same. The iMac obviously feels snappier because it launches apps faster, and runs said apps more quickly as well but as far as OS responsiveness goes (i.e. moving files around in finder, browsing in finder, using Quicklook/coverflow, using Expose/dashboard, spaces, etc) there is hardly any difference between the two. The C2D renders icon previews quicker and probably puts up quicklook results faster but it's not that slow on the PBG4.

The one "OS responsiveness" area where I do see a clear benefit is using Spotlight. On the PBG4 I can type faster than the results come up and it takes a few seconds after I type in my query to get the full result list, but on the C2D it's instantaneous (which was pretty sweet the first time I experienced this). This is the only area though where I feel there is an obvious speed difference. I don't think Spotlight runs any faster in Tiger than in Leopard though so it's not like downgrading to Tiger will give you any better performance in this area.

I used to have 1.25GB of RAM installed in this computer and when I had Tiger it was 1.25GB. I installed Leopard and then a few weeks after that I upgraded to 2GB of RAM because I needed the extra memory for photo editing. I noticed some speed benefit in the photo editing but not really any speed benefit in OS usability due to the extra RAM. As long as you don't have too many apps open at the same time 1.25GB of RAM should be enough to run Leopard too.

Anyways I think you're going to be fine with Leopard on the PBG4.

Ruahrc

Turns out those last gen Powerbooks are quite hot items on ebay. Sold it for almost $500. I just went out and bought a new 9400m based whitebook for $800 . I figured that was a decent trade up. I just wish Apple would make a subnotebook that wasn't a large iphone.

$800? MacMall? Education discount?

450 said:

$800? MacMall? Education discount?

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Ebay with Cashback. Even got instant cashback too. New, Sealed in box. I thought it was a pretty good deal, especially with no tax.

I ran Leopard on a 1.33Ghz iBook G4 before I got my new macbook, with a gig of ram. Ran quite well, so I would strongly recommend leopard.

If the video playback was better on the Powerbook, I'd keep it, but some of the things I'd like to be able to do with it (Netflix/Flash video) aren't supported, so I am basically forced to do an upgrade to a computer I don't like as much. Oh well.

Man seriously. I hate flash video. It seems like sometimes my ipod touch runs youtube videos better than my PBG4 (Yes I'm aware that iPT youtube is h.264 encoded video, and there's a good reason why. I wish I could get that for my PBG4!)

On the other hand I was able to download and run a .h264 in 720p than runs flawlessly on the machine. Flash as a video format sucks!

Ruahrc

If I had an iBook I would use Tiger.

Ruahrc said:

Man seriously. I hate flash video. It seems like sometimes my ipod touch runs youtube videos better than my PBG4 (Yes I'm aware that iPT youtube is h.264 encoded video, and there's a good reason why. I wish I could get that for my PBG4!)

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You could always rip the youtube video and then convert to your favorite file format. It would be kinda time consuming though.