Is moving from Tiger to Leopard a good move?

I have used 10.5.8 on my PowerBook G 4 (1.5 Ghz/1.5Gb Ram) for the past 3 years. I bought it used and it had 10.4.x installed which I upgraded with my Leopard retail DVD. There have been no performance issues and I am using Safari 5.1.5 presently.

If you want to go the clean install route I suggest you consider an external bootable firewire drive (SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner) to clone your present HDD to. You can then boot from the external clone drive and wipe the original drive then install 10.5 from the DVD. Finally you use migration assistant to get all your stuff from the external clone onto the PowerBook.

If for some reason you do not want to keep 10.5 then you can clone the external 10.4 back to the PowerBook or use it as an alternate startup. If you are happy with 10.5 then use the external to clone the 10.5 installation as a backup ( a lot more reliable than Time Machine, IMO). Be sure to get a firewire external drive as USB will not boot G 4 PowerBooks

I purchased mine here; http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/on-the-go

If you're looking in the used market, make sure you look at retail versions and not gray-faced disks, as the gray-faced disks are locked to the systems they were delivered with (and Powerbooks never shipped with Leopard).

You can buy new unopened Leopard software from http://www.hardcoremac.com

I've run Leopard in my PB 1.67Ghz with 2GB memory for a couple of years with no issues I'd call out.

There is an upgrade disk for Leopard which requires 10.4 to be installed ... this is what I used. It works fine, unless you need to reinstall it after you do the upgrade ... no more 10.4 on the system so it will no longer work! That may be OK if you have good backup, just be aware of that limitation.

When you upgrade, you need to look at any programs under login items under your user ID as well as any programs listed on the System Preference pane, to see if they need to be upgraded to Leopard in order to run. Also go through your applications list and look at the non-Apple applications to see if there is a Leopard upgrade available for any of them.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard installation system requirements

http://support.apple.com/kb/TA24950

Leopard is no longer available at the Apple Store but may be available by calling Apple Phone Sales @ 1-800-MY-APPLE (1-800-692-7753).

If you can't obtain a retail install DVD from Apple, look on eBay or Google the installer part numbers to possibly find at an on-line store. Here's what to look for:

MB427Z/A Leopard 10.5.1 install DVD

MB576Z/A Leopard 10.5.4 install DVD

MB021Z/A Leopard 10.5.6 install DVD (single user)

MB022Z/A Leopard 10.5.6 install DVD (5-user family pack)

Installing Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1544

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Installation and Setup Guide

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/leopard_install-setup.pdf

After you install the base 10.5, download & install the 10.5.8 combo update at http://support.apple.com/downloads/Mac_OS_X_10_5_8_Combo_Update

The DVD should look like this

Caution - Leopard does not support classic mode. So, if you currently open OS 9 apps in classic mode, you won't be able to do this if you upgrade to Leopard.

 Cheers, Tom 😉