Mac Upgrade Question

[galt11]

My mother has a teal iMac witha 350 mhz G3 processor I try to keep up and running for her when i can. It currently has OS 10.2.8 on it. Even with 1 gig of ram it seems to run a little slow. However, can this be upgraded to one of the news OS's like 10.3 (panther) or 10.4 (tiger)? I work mainly with windows machines, so my mac knowlege is a little limited. Thanks for any help.

Adam

[George]

Of course the iMac can go to Panther (10.3), or Tiger (10.4), but why is the question. Jaguar on that machine is just as good as Panther, or Tiger. That iMac will not run any faster than it is now, no matter what OS version is on it. The speed limit is the processor, system bus and the lack of graphics card power.

RAM helps, but considering the amount of RAM in it already, nothing short of a newer machine is going to give you a speed boost. If you had a PowerMac tower like the B&W G3, or Graphite G4, you could easily upgrade the processor, the video card and the speed of the startup hard drive. In an iMac, this is difficult to impossible.

Live with it as it is and enjoy it for what it is, a collectors item ;-)

A couple things: Go into system preferences and in the Displays option, set the colors to "Thousands" instead of millions. The screen will look fine, but tthe system won't have to work as hard to draw it. Set the desktop pattern/picture to a solid color instead of an image. This will also remove a little display processing load from the system. Otherwise, it's about as fast as it's going to ever be.

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Regards,

[galt11]

The main reason for the upgrade is that I have access to a few programs she would like to use but they are only for 10.3 or 10.4. I have heard there are some nice improvements in 10.4 but I am unsure. I was just concerned the computer didn't have the horsepower for the newer OS.

Adam

[George]

No problem putting Panther on as it comes on CD, but Tiger comes on a DVD disc and if you don't have a DVD drive in the iMac, you are SOL. Unless you use the option Apple offers to send the DVD disc back to them and have them replace it with a CD install copy of Tiger (you can't have both, only one, or the other).

Yes, there are some nice improvements in 103 and 10.4, but a speed boost on a slow processor is not one of them ;-)

Make sure the HD on the iMac is not getting too full. OSX systems need to see at least 20% of their HD left as free space. Without this breathing room, an OSX system will eventually grind to a halt on you.

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Regards,