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General discussion

To upgrade or not to upgrade

Jun 30, 2007 5:44AM PDT

My current computer is a toshiba sattelite laptop, 2.4 ghz 496mb or ram, and a 60gb hardrive, Windows is ok, I've just been working with it for years, and would like to start working with macs. My fiance just upgraded to a macbook and has given me her 12" powerbook g4 867mhz. Its in good shape, the hard drive is starting to fail, but other than that all is well. My question is, is it worth it to upgrade the PB, and by upgrade, i mean adding a new 100gb 7200rpm HD, 1gb of ram, and putting tiger OS on. The whole thing will probably cost about 340.00. I will be using the computer for daily internet browsing, checking email, and I have an isight camera that i will be using with ichat. I guess I want to know if it will perform near the same speeds as my current laptop, the things that worry me are that the processor is only 867mhz, and whether or not it will be fast enough to handle tiger without me having to stair at that beachball everytime I want to do something. Thanks in advance for the advice.

Discussion is locked

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Leopard is coming
Jul 1, 2007 8:29PM PDT

You might want to wait until OS X/Leopard comes out in October, I believe, rather than buy the current OS X/Tiger.

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Upgrade
Jul 1, 2007 9:50PM PDT

It is certainly worth upgrading this machine, in the manner you describe.

Given that it is now a little long in the tooth, I would consider Tiger to be the highest OS that this machine will comfortably manage.

Consider that even the bottom of the line MacBook is sporting a Dual Core processor that has a clock speed that makes your G4 seem positively antediluvian.

That said, this machine will give you years of service after you upgrade it.

P