What operating system for iMac G4?
I recently picked up two machines for $7 USD each. Otherwise they were seconds away from being destroyed quite violently. One machine is an Ultra Small Form Factor Lenovo ThinkCentre M57 and the other computer is a 15" iMac G4 800 MHz. I'm going to be putting Windows 7 Enterprise on the ThinkCentre, but I'm not certain as to what OS I should put on the G4 iMac. My newer fancier iMac G4 runs 10.5.8 Leopard, but I don't want Leopard's bloat on this machine. Does 10.4.11 Tiger run on these slower G4 systems?
Comments
Not bad for $7 each! What was the reason for being destroyed violently?
For a G4, OS X Tiger runs well. Do you know yet how much RAM it has? It wouldn't hurt to upgrade that if it's a little low. Tiger appreciates having at least 512 MB for a more responsive system. Just my experience with having some G4 towers. I tend to look at Leopard as an OS for G5 machines.
Alternatively they were the last to natively boot up to MacOS 9. I have a G4 Sawtooth (400 MHz) dedicated for this.
It originally had 512MB of RAM, but I upgraded it with another spare stick to 768MB, which is what my PowerBook G4 has (which is also running Tiger, mostly for Spotify).
They were in the scrap pile at a local organization that takes donated computers (usually Dell OptiPlex machines and Lenovo ThinkCentres from corporate environments) and cleans them, loads them with Ubuntu and pairs them with keyboards, monitors and mice to give to school kids across the state. I volunteer there quite frequently, and I hadn't done any work in the back where their scrap pile was. It's mostly machines that are damaged or don't fit their needs. I was told that any of the scrap machines can be had for $7 or $10 each, depending on what it is. I also had the ability to load the ThinkCentre with 4GB of RAM before I left. DDR2 is plentiful there. OK, time to end the wall of text.