10.5.7 on PB G4 12, It works very well.

Hi, Alfonso. It's good to hear that you're pleased with Leopard on your PB.

The initial high temperatures were probably due to Spotlight constructing a new index of your hard drive. That process can load the CPU quite heavily.

Alfonso:

Glad Leopard turned out well for you.

😉 cornelius

I too have loaded Leopard on my Powerbook G4 12-inch, and it's the 867MHZ at that. I have 640MB of RAM but have ordered a 1GIG RAM module, that will beef it up to 1152MB. It runs OK so far on 640, but I'll have much less swapping to disk with more RAM.

It can't play videos real well, but Safari 4 runs on it well, and that's all that's needed for most work. It's a great little Cafe surfer. Since this is the last upgrade from Apple that will run on this little baby, it's maxed out for the rest of it's life. Fortunately updates of Safari and Leopard have actually sped things up, rather than just adding more bloatware like some other companies we know.

Followup, I have installed the 1 GIG RAM module in the little beauty. Wow, what a difference. No swapping, all the applications respond reasonably well. I am running the iStat Menus which I have set up to watch the CPU and MEMORY usage. So I know when something is taxing the computer. It's mostly when trying to watch video.

But otherwise Safari and Evernote run great, with plenty of RAM, it responds as well or better than Panther or Tiger did in 640 MB. I suppose Tiger could have used the extra RAM better also.

Since I love the keyboard on this little guy, and it's the smallest Mac notebook, it carries well in the backpack. Since Safari 4 runs on PowerPC still, it is pretty fast rendering web pages.

A trick I used to reduce the resources it consumes, was to disable the Dashboard features, since I didn't use them much anyway. I think I found that here in Apple discussions.

So the little PowerBook G4 12-inch is my main Coffee shop nomad netbook. I think I can get another couple years out of it.

Hi Keith!

Thanks for posting and letting us know how Leopard works on the PB G4 12" 867 MB. Glad to hear that it performs better than Tiger. A lot of people have questions and concerns about that, so your testimony is valuable.

😉 cornelius

So as a 12' PB 1.33 user I am very happy to hear your post. Question for you: did you just use the over-the-counter version of Leopard? I have a MB running Leopard from the factory, and I'm pretty sure I cannot use this copy of Leopard. I'm just curious your process in moving from Panther-Tiger-Leopard because I'm debating the same move. Any info would be great!

Thanks, Paul

mathboy:
.
To install Leopard on your PowerBook G4 12' 1.33 GHz you will need to meet the Leopard installation system requirements. Note that Leopard requires 9 GB of disk capacity, so make sure you have plenty for that, as well as allowing a cushion of 15% of total disk capacity for swap files and directory growth. I recommend maxxing out the RAM to a full 1.25 GHz. You will need the Full Retail Version as computer specific disks will not work, and, particularly you cannot use an installer specific to an Intel Mac to install to a PowerPC Mac.

😉 cornelius

I'm glad it worked out for you. Makes me think that I should go for the upgrade as well considering that I'm still running a 10.3.9.
My baby only has 128 MB of RAM, so I'm thinking I should max that out before putting Leopard on it.
Ultimately, I want to install vmware and windows, and possibly linux.. would my powerbook be able to handle this load?
Or would it be a better idea to buy a new macbook altogether..

any input would be appreciated!

esbece:

Welcome to Apple Discussions.

Ultimately, I want to install vmware and windows, and possibly linux.. would my powerbook be able to handle this load?

Unfortunately, the only way to run Windows on PowerPC Mac is using Virtual PC, which is woefully slow. VMware Fusion requires an Intel based Mac. You may be able to run Ubuntu on your PowerPC Mac, but you will have to partition it so that your OS X installation is on a different partition. With VMware Fusion you can switch from OS X, to Windows, to Ubuntu, PC-BSD with the click. However, you can upgrade your RAM and run Leopard on your PB G4 until you get an Intel based Mac.

😉 cornelius

i've tried virtualpc and it is slow like you said.
i had a feeling a new macbook would be necessary for vmware.
thanks for your tips!
much appreciated

Keith Rowland wrote:
Fortunately updates of Safari and Leopard have actually sped things up, rather than just adding more bloatware like some other companies we know.

One of the greatest things Apple did was continue to optimize, optimize, optimize the OS, instead of bloat it. The result is that we owners of ancient PowerBooks can still run the very latest Mac OS X on them, while owners of PCs gnashed their teeth and cursed Microsoft when Vista's system requirements outstripped their relatively new machines.

That optimization is probably why OS X can run the iPhone as well.

esbece:

I ran VirtualPC on my Pismo for years and tolerated it because I needed to run Windows to be able to use dedicated software my wife needs for her work related business. That is the main reason I decided to get a MBP, because I loved (still do) my Pismo and was happy with it. However, the MacBook Pro is a beautiful thing. Windows XP runs in VMware Fusion as quickly as anything else on this baby, although I am told that it is faster if installed using BootCamp. I prefer VMware Fusion because it allows me to do a lot of other things, like switching between OS X and Windows or Ubuntu, and it is plenty fast enough for me this way, although that could be because I have VPC as a reference point.

Good luck.

😉 cornelius

I just bought a PowerBook G4 12" 768 MB and I'm wondering if anyone has any experiences with running Leopard on a machine like mine.
It still has Panther on it now, and I want to do a clean install to Leopard.

Did you read the previous posts in this thread?

Your Powerbook will run Leopard OK, but you'd be significantly better off if you replaced its removable 512MB RAM module with a 1GB module.

Thanks!

I have but I didn't quite get the bit of replacing the RAM module. I'm excited to find out how things like spotlight will run once I replaced the 512MB RAM module with a 1GB module.
I got the bit where it's hard for the powerpc processors to cope with spotlight running all the time, i've also seen this happening on my PowerBook G4 17 inch. Spotlight is definately slowing things down, but then again Leopard runs great on my PowerBook G4 17 inch.

I'll keep you guys informed once I did the clean install to Leopard on my PowerBook G4 12-inch.