Comments on: Laptopless

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 06:39:15 +0000

I have OSX.3.9 running on an iMac 233MHz with 160 MB of RAM. It takes about 2 minutes to boot, but I only use it for web serving on occasion. In fact, I’m using it now!

By: claus dettelbacher

claus dettelbacher — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 19:12:39 +0000

Does anybody know, how I can motivate my 10.3-CD’s to install it on a 266 Powerbook with 512Ram and 40 GB HD??

10.2.8 is running well – and now I need skype, which seems to be available only for 10.3.

There is a Software called Sonnet PCI X Installer. Is this useful? When I insert the CD1 and click on install 10.3, it says, that the installation is not possible on this computer…

By: Serge Melis

Serge Melis — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 23:59:08 +0000

Running 10.3 on a G3/500/512 iMac, a bit sluggish due to the slower hdm but happily running…

By: Romain Lafourcade

Romain Lafourcade — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 10:30:43 +0000

I’ve added a brand new 100+ Gb hard drive and a Radeon 9200 graphic card to my G4/400 PCI with 1 Gb of RAM. Now it’s up to the task with Panther + Apache and PHP. Photoshop is really sluggish though.

If your graphic card doesn’t support Quartz Extreme, I suggest you install PCI Extreme.

By: Shane Shepherd

Shane Shepherd — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 20:01:10 +0000

I’m currently running OS 10.3.8 on a 400mhz G3 iMac and 384M RAM, an 800mhz G3 iBook w/ 764M RAM, (and a G5 iMac too!). I’ve had no problems with any of these configurations!

By: Eric Gruber

Eric Gruber — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 17:58:27 +0000

Hey Eric,

I sold my iBook and had to use a Blue and White G3 to tides me over until my PowerBook arrived. Anyways, this thing had 450Mhz and some 4XX (I can’t remember) MB of RAM in it. It ran like a champ. I’ve even seen OS X.3 run on a Wall Street PB with little lag.

However, if you start up Virtual PC … well, that’s another story …

By: Dave J. Lowe

Dave J. Lowe — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 16:11:15 +0000

Just to add to the dogpile… I’ve been running Panther on my blue and white tower (450 MHz G3) since it came out and every prior OS X version before that. Every update seems to make it faster, though I wish I had more RAM – 384 is the bare minimum I’d advise. Still, I don’t remember the last time it crashed…

By: Meitar

Meitar — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 13:05:18 +0000

I’m going to have to agree with my fellow commenters above. I actually run Panther (10.3.8) on an ancient iMac SE:DV. (That’s a 400 MHz G3, though I’ve upped the RAM to 384 MB a few years ago.)

No, it’s not really that fast, so I don’t like to load it up too bad. But I’ve been using it steadily ever since Tiger was first released and, well, it’s just great.

Apple rules.

By: hi

hi — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 07:35:45 +0000

By: Philippe

Philippe — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 03:10:00 +0000

Dual G4, 450Mhz, 640 Mb Ram is pretty good, including Classic.
First generation Ti book, 400Mhz, 384Mb Ram, 10Gb HD is a bit sluggish in Classic, but text editors, Apache, MySql do run fine. Not a speed demon anymore, mind you.

By: Nick Cowie

Nick Cowie — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 02:40:26 +0000

A blue and white G3/300 with 192Mb and 10.2.8 handles the load as a development server and mac testbed in the office. No speed demon but reliable.

My battered g4/550 powerbook with 512Mb and 10.3.7 is used for everything from photoshop to running Apache/PHP/MySQL.

By: Rob Mientjes

Rob Mientjes — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 21:07:06 +0000

All I know for sure is that you need more RAM to run it properly, and maybe the video card isn’t too spiffy… However, I was also quite surprised to see 10.3 run on a 400Mhz TiPB with 512 MBRAM. If it’s just temporarily, you’d do fine to use OS X, I think.

By: Kenny F

Kenny F — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 21:04:15 +0000

It’s totally do-able. I have Panther 10.3.8 running on a 1998 Beige G3 Desktop 233mhz/576ram/6meg vram. While the screen draw time is slightly sluggish, the OS works just fine! Photoshop, BBedit, Apache server, Itunes, etc… (I used XPostFacto to facilitae the OSX install.)

But I don’t have Virtual PC (6) on the machine so I don’t know about that on such a slow G3 processor.

Generally quite satisfied with the above set-up as a home-based OSX system to compliment my 15″ Titanium Powerbook (867mhz) which is my main developement machine. (Thanks to Virtual PC with IE5.0, 5.5, 6.0 FF1.0.1, Opera 7 for PC browser compliance!)

Sorry to hear about your malfunctions.

By: The_Decryptor

The_Decryptor — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 11:34:57 +0000

I installed 10.3.3 on that exact same model i think.

Apart from not having Quartz Extreme, it’s fine, there are some slowdowns when your opening apps, but nothing major.

By: Chris Neale

Chris Neale — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 09:59:52 +0000

Running Jaguar [10.2.something] on Mac Cube – can be slow, especially compiling Mozilla browsers – does work!