# Power Mac G4 upgrade



## Squashman (Apr 4, 2003)

Neighbor across the street asked me to find out how much it was going to cost to do some upgrades on his Power Mac. I know next to nothing about Apple products but even that is more than he knows.

Here are some specs.

OS X 10.1.5 (9.2 Classic)
867 MHZ PPC cpu
512 MB PC133 ram
Nvidia Gforce 2mx 32mb video card
80 GB HD (System drive)
2 - 120 GB HD (used for media storage)

I think the first thing we really have to do is upgrade the OS. I haven't heard the greatest things about OS X 10.5 Leopard and as I have read this is the last OS that supports the PPC cpu. So I was just thinking of just upgrading to 10.4 Tiger. My main reasoning for getting the OS upgraded is to have Safari and Firefox installed for Web Browsing. Is their any compelling reason to use Leopard over Tiger?

So some questions about upgrading the OS.
1) Can I do an upgrade from 10.1.5 to 10.4 or 10.5 without having to do a clean install?
2) Currently the system drive only has 3gb's of free space left so I am assuming I am going to have to free up some space to even do the upgrade.
3) Would it be possible to first clone the 80 GB system drive to one of the larger 120 GB drives and then use that as the system drive? Trying to keep from having to do a fresh install. He has lots of apps installed. I am going to assume so. If OS X is BSD based I would assume I could use DD just like I do in Linux.
4) Will an OS upgrade affect any of his existing applications?
5) Do I have to buy a specific OS X 10.4/5 install disc for PPC? Is there one specifically for upgrade and one for full install like Windows?
6) Will the classic OS 9.2 still be there after I upgrade to 10.4/5?

Some questions about wireless.
1) The G4 has a slot of an Apple Airport Card. Is it my understanding that the Airport Card only supports 802.11B and they never made an AirPort Card for this slot that supported 802.11g? I don't want to use the slot if I can't put an 802.11G card in there. What are your recommendations for a PCI wireless card? Would this be Ok? My neighbor doesn't want to run an ethernet cable to it.

I think that is it for now. Just need to figure out the OS upgrade and the wireless. Ram upgrade should be easy enough and I think he will be fine with the Video Card he has. I don't even want to think about how much a CPU upgrade would cost on this thing. Uprgrading hardware on a Mac seems expensive and a real PITA compared to a PC!

Thanks in advance.


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## exegete (Oct 26, 2005)

Howdy.

1) Can I do an upgrade from 10.1.5 to 10.4 or 10.5 without having to do a clean install?​
It might be better to do a clean install. If the person has any need for Classic, then you can only upgrade to 10.4. Realistically with that processor, that is all that you can expect to run decently. Keep in mind that 10.1 is a nine year old system.

2) Currently the system drive only has 3gb's of free space left so I am assuming I am going to have to free up some space to even do the upgrade​
Yeah, 3 GB out of 60 is usually not enough to run well; best estimate is that if you are within 10% of the total capacity, you need to find alternates/upgrade HD. And any system upgrade will take more space than the current 10.1.

3) Would it be possible to first clone the 80 GB system drive to one of the larger 120 GB drives and then use that as the system drive? Trying to keep from having to do a fresh install. He has lots of apps installed. I am going to assume so. If OS X is BSD based I would assume I could use DD just like I do in Linux.​
You could, but again, a nine year old system will have its own issues.

4) Will an OS upgrade affect any of his existing applications?​
Probably most, if not all, of them. There were significant changes once Apple went to Intel chips, and many older programs couldn't handle the transition. I would not be surprised if most of the applications would need upgrading.

5) Do I have to buy a specific OS X 10.4/5 install disc for PPC? Is there one specifically for upgrade and one for full install like Windows?​
With that processor, the highest you can load and safely use is 10.4.11 (latest version of 10.4). You would have to check. My recommendation is to buy the full install disk. There is no "backup plan" otherwise.

6) Will the classic OS 9.2 still be there after I upgrade to 10.4/5?​
It will only work with 10.4. From 10.5 onward, Classic is not supported.

Realistically, by the time the person buys the disk, and all the software upgrades (and they would still all be out of date by at least three years), it might be more cost effective to buy a brand new iMac and get up-to-date software. The key thing is to get as much RAM as possible for whatever machine the person buys.

At least this is something to think about.


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