[X Newbies] Jaguar vs. Panther

[Randy B. Singer]

Dale Critchley said:

>I'm looking into setting up my wife's iBook (300 MHz) with OS X.


It is quite possible that this would not be a satisfactory setup.  At 
300MHz, OS X (especially Jaguar) would be on the pokey side.  But even 
more importantly, depending on how your iBook came from Apple, it can 
have, maximum, either 288 or 320MB of RAM.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=43094

That amount of RAM might not be enough to get decent performance from 
Panther.  So you may be in trouble if you go with either Jaguar or 
Panther.

Also, your wife's iBook came with, at maximum, a 6GB hard drive.  OS X is 
a large installation, and you would have to leave OS 9 on the drive if 
you want to be able to use Classic.  OS X likes to have a large amount of 
free contiguous hard drive space for things such as caches, scratch 
space, virtual memory, system databases, etc., to run well.  Lack of free 
contiguous hard drive space might further impact performance.

If I had a 300MHz iBook, I would stick with OS 9.  If you are really 
intent on trying OS X on it, I would do a full backup of the hard drive 
first, so that if OS X turns out to be a disaster you can erase the drive 
and easily restore your machine to the way it was before updating to OS X.

Sorry to be negative, but I believe that updating to OS X will cause you 
a lot of heartache on the Mac that you have.


Randy B. Singer
Co-Author of: The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th and 6th editions)

How To Deal With Common OS X 10.3 Panther Problems
http://www.macattorney.com/panther.html