OS 10.4.? and Classic

You lose Classic when running an Intel Mac or when running Leopard or higher. Classic works fine on a PPC up to an including 10.4.11

Couldn't've put it any more precise or concise than Limnos did. 🙂

I still use Classic in 10.4.11 on a PPC Mac with all the current OS updates.

10.5 drops support for Classic on all Macs. However, even if you lose Classic environment within OS X 10.5, should you upgrade, your G4 Tower still has the option to boot into OS 9, if your model is one of the earlier ones before FW800 was introduced. OS 9 and OS X can be installed on the same hard drive partition.

Different versions of OS X can be installed on different partitions, so you could even have a bootable 10.4 system with Classic support and try out 10.5 on another drive/partition if you needed to run 10.5 for some reason.

"Upgrading" the OS is always a consideration of your investment in all your apps, the hardware, and third-party devices (printer/scanner/camera/etc) and all those drivers. When you upgrade the OS sometimes you need to upgrade everything else, and often the more cost-effective solution is to keep the old machine running the old stuff, and get a new machine to run new stuff. Rather than upgrading an old machine to still support the old stuff but can't quite run all the new stuff very well if at all.

640 MB RAM is really barely enough for doing any serious work in OS X, you should consider at least 1GB or max it out to 1.5GB or 2GB, whatever the limit is for that G4 tower model. The older RAM for those models is fairly cheap now.

I should also add that your computer doesn't meet [Leopard 10.5 Technical Requirements|http://www.apple.com/macosx/techspecs> anyway.

You can update to the final Tiger version 10.4.11. Here's the link for the 10.4.11 combo update http://support.apple.com/kb/TA24901?viewlocale=en_US

If you have an older Mac G4 that is capable of running Leopard, you can still run your OS 9 applications if you install OS 9.x on a separate hard drive partition.

 Cheers, Tom 😉

Hello,

"what is the difference between the 'standard' (smaller) one and the 'combo'?"

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure the Combo Update includes all patches released since the 10.5.

I run Classic on my iBookG4 running 10.4.11. Still have a couple graphic apps I use on it.



Carolyn 🙂

An update may come as an incremental update which only includes new items since the previous update, or as a "combo" (presumably the new word for "combination" and not even a proper shortening of the word - ugh!) updater which contains the components of a series of updates to be installed in one operation. The latter is handy for when you do a fresh installation (no, I won't say "install") of the operating system from discs that may represent a very early version of system and want to jump to the current version in one step.

"SheepShaver is an Open Source PowerPC MacOS run-time environment. That is, it enables you to run PowerPC Classic MacOS software on your computer, even if you are using a different operating system. However, you still need a copy of MacOS and a PowerMacintosh ROM image to use this program. SheepShaver is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). "
http://gwenole.beauchesne.info/en/projects/sheepshaver

Installing Mac OS Classic on SheepShaver is a struggle. There is some instability once you have completed the installation.

As mentioned above, maxing out your RAM would improve your performance, even with the relatively slow processor.

As for the keyboard; you can clean it with soap and water - a good flushing with all the keys removed, rinse and hang up to dry out for a week or so. Obviously you will need a spare keyboard while you do this!!

Removing the keys isn't all that difficult - you can buy a little plastic forceps-like tool to do it. However, it is very tedious - there are a lot of keys! And yes, I have done this when half a bottle of wine got spilled in the keyboard. And I'm typing on said keyboard now.

However, this is no doubt overkill for your problem. You may prefer to repeat your previous exercise using the spray solvent/freezing agent obtainable for cleaning circuit boards from the likes of Maplin (or Radio Shack et al in the states).

You have checked the key repeat rate set in Keyboard prefs, I assume?

Message was edited by: noondaywitch

We are using an iMac G-4 running OS 10.4.11. We used to have Classic also installed and our scanner; Cannon CanoScan LiDE20/LiDE 30 Ver. 1.03 used the Classic. We had some problems and the local Apple store, Kahala Mall, Honolulu, Hawaii, took care of them but when they reinstalled the OS they only put the 10.4.11 back. I still have the OS 9 on a CD. Can I reinstall that to be able to used our scanner or will doing that cause problems with OS 10.4.11?

I used the original disk to try and install the classic and get as far as installing the soft wear update. My Mac then tells me to put the install applications disk into the machine but it is already in the Mac. Please, what am I doing wrong?