Panther or Tiger for this guy

C

Calvados

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I've been sort of contentedly limping along on my mickey mouse G3 iBook running OS 10.3.9, but with a vague feeling I'm still in the middle ages. I really don't know what I'm missing, or if I'm missing anything. I'd appreciate some comments, the kind that might motivate me to modernize or stay put. Would moving up to Tiger be more trouble than its worth, or is Panther sophisticated enough for a guy who has no interest in photos, games, or music. I use my machine almost exclusively for research projects.

Having become up to here with Comcast, and with no DSL in my area, I'm back with dial-up. If I thought Tiger would speed me up a little, I'd install it in a minute.
 
It really depends on your RAM. But if you aren't interested in new features like "widgets" (things you can find on the internet anyway) you're really not missing much in Tiger. I was in Panther as you are till about 6 months ago and now that I've "moved up" there's a speed increase but if you don't have more than 512MB of RAM on your computer you might be a bit frustrated.

What sort of apps do you use, what sort of work do you do on your computer?
 
Your response was perfect for helping me focus. To answer your questions, I have 640MB of RAM. I write a great deal and spend virtually a lot of time on AppleWorks, and appreciably more time on Camino and Safari chasing data and raw material for background. That surfing with dial-up is glacially slow is universally known.

Further, I'm unable to receive phone calls while online with my V90 modem. I've subsequently learned that V.92 comes installed on OS 10.4.3 which, if true, would enable me to broaden my online experience. Also, I've read that the V.92 modem really speeds up connections. If this is true, I could fall in love with it. However, I'd rather hear it from a reliable source before I do an installation toe dance.
 
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the modem has nothing to do with the OS.

If you spend THAT much time online, you really ought to investigate Cable or DSL internet. At the very least, add a 2nd phone line. External modems are available and quite inexpensive (as no one uses them anymore)

The best you can hope fore using a modem is 53k down speed. If you get significantly less, have the phone company check your line for noise.
 
You are correct, the ugly truth is I'd have to buy a newer Mac that comes with a 56K V.92 internal modem already installed. There isn't much I can do other than junk my current machine and modernize.

I've dismissed external modems as not a desirable option for me.

As for having having the phone company check my line for noise, only common courtesy keeps me from laughing so hard and getting a hernia. I'm considering Wi Fi as a better choice for me than a 2nd line.

As for DSL and cable, I covered that in my opening post.

Thank you for helping me know when I'm licked as far as a V.92 modem is concerned.
 
I generally DON'T recommend upgrading to Tiger, especially on older systems. Tiger is slower than Panther, owing largely to the fact that it wants more RAM, and IMHO Spotlight is a huge step backwards from Panther's inline file search. Dashboard is a big memory hog, so you would probably want to avoid it entirely with less than 1GB of RAM (besides, it's not really useful with dialup anyway). So the big new features in Tiger are basically anti-features if you don't have a modern machine (and maybe even if you do).

The most compelling general reason to upgrade is to use newer software that requires 10.4 or higher. For instance, Safari 3 or Firefox 3. They're faster, but if you're on dialup, your bottleneck is probably not the rendering speed of your browser, so it probably won't matter too much.

So my advice at this point would be to stick with Panther. Panther's a great OS.
 
Calvados said:
I've been sort of contentedly limping along on my mickey mouse G3 iBook running OS 10.3.9 ... Would moving up to Tiger be more trouble than its worth, or is Panther sophisticated enough ... I use my machine almost exclusively for research projects.

I'm back with dial-up. If I thought Tiger would speed me up a little, I'd install it in a minute.
Click to expand...

My two cents' worth - right now I'm using a b/w tower G3 350 on 10.3.9 with an Apple internal modem on dialup, currently V90 (although I do adjust that to V34 when line conditions are bad). [At home I use an eMac on 10.4.11 with ADSL.]

To be honest, Panther does the job fine for browsing and research. It doesn't have many bells and whistles, but it does the job. Oh, and it handles photos and music okay, just not terribly quickly, but that's the 350 processor, not the OS.

No, I don't think you need to move to Tiger. Your iBook will handle it - but slowly. You would also need maximum RAM.
 
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