Anyone with a 12" G4 Powerbook enjoying running Leopard?

I have a 15" G4 PowerBook with a 1.25GHz processor and 512MB of RAM, running 10.5.3. I use this laptop to work from home via a Cisco VPN and Mail, web browsing with Safari, minor spreadsheet and document editing with Numbers and Pages, bits of development, and various other things like iPhoto, iTunes, Preview, etc.

I do not consider anything I do day to day to be too intensive. Overall, I've had a really good experience with Leopard, even on this machine. I haven't been affected by 90% of the problems I see on these boards 🙂, and find the performance of applications to be fine, and the system as a whole feels zippy. I enjoy using the machine more now that it's Leopard than I did when it was Tiger, though I can't necessarily put my finger on why (maybe it has to do with things feeling more well integrated).

Anyway, I also know there are things I can't do on this machine, and don't do them. Video editing for example. I don't even think I can run iMovie on this platform. I'm not sure how intensive your music production stuff is, however if you are happy with the performance running Panther, chances are that the performance will not be much different using Leopard. I would probably be more concerned with your application's compatibility with Leopard than anything else. The other thing to consider is that you'll be going from a mature Panther to a relatively immature Leopard (only being at 10.5.3)...

I have a G4 Powerbook 12 inch also but with a 1.5 mhz processor with the ram maxed out. I updated it when Leopard when it first came out. I'll have to admit it was a nightmare in the beginning. I had so many problems when I first installed it. Just remember to back up your system first it is very important. Leopard, at first ran sluggish on it. After a week I was crying to put Tiger back on but it got better with the updates,which apple did very quickly. Also coming here and checking the net also helped a lot. I had to update a lot of apps too because they didn't work on my laptop anymore. At the time it was superduper. This was my favorite app for backing up my stuff and ran absolutely flawless on my powerbook but when I updated it I was in trouble. It didn't work. Thank god for my tower. I have a G4 tower also. Yesterday I updated it to Leopard but thanks to my experience with the power book I was prepared for it.

First do a back up. When you install leopard, do it with a new account. I'll explain why. When I just updated to Leopard and used my account on my machine already it totally wigged out. It locked me out of my machine and when I did get in there it was a permissions mess. I did it on my tower with a new account and it ran like a top. Before doing anything else, launch software update and get everything updated. I then used migration assistant to bring my stuff over. To do this you are going to need an external drive with the disk image of your old system on it. Doing it this way was less painful. It took me 3 hours on my tower to do it but it should take less on the powerbook since the drive is 80 gigs compared to my towers 120 gig drive. Plus my tower does a lot more stuff. It took me a day of my life to get Leopard running on my tower but that was because I saw what was coming. I have minor permissions problems with files. I thought I lost my iphoto file but it was just a permissions problem. The web is your best friend but also can be your enemy. Always get several opinions before doing something. Check the dates of the posts. Never go on the first hit. Check everything. Make sure people had almost the same exact situation you had with similar equipment.

Overall I am happy with Leopard. It has some little toys to play with, like spaces, a new dock (which takes getting used to but works), front row, screen sharing (Apple remote desktop is better but it works for the simple things.) Leopard works a little better than tiger if you have mobile me. but just a little. It got better but it's no tiger. Tiger still launched a lot quicker and ran smoother on the power pc chips. Leopard was definitely made to run to take advantage of the power of the intel chips but this old dog still has some tricks left in her. I know this post is late but I hope it helps a little. It's like every major system update. There are bound to be bugs. Leopard was a mess but it is a couple of months down the road and things are better. My apps work, it moves smoother and just like that it's a mac again. It just works.

Good Luck!

Thanks oldschool!

I was browsing the forum to ask the exact same question. We have three macs at home and bought a family license for Leopard as soon as it came out but installed it only on the iMac (which was only a few weeks old at that point). My husband and I have been waiting for any issues related to installing it on power pcs to be solved before attempting to install on our PBs. I'm glad to hear your powerbook works fine now on Leopard. I think I'll do a bit of a clean up on my system, uninstall files and software I no longer need, and then use superduper to mirror it to an external drive. Only then I'll do a clean install of Leopard. Hopefully that will minimize any issues.

Thanks