Upgrading to Panther question

N

nperjanik

Registered
Hi out there!

I have an 800mHz iMac w/ 256meg RAM and need to know if it would be worth while (performance wise) upgrading from Jaguar (10.2.8) to Panther. I've read about Panther needing a lot of RAM on older macs. Is 256meg enough? Should I add more RAM before upgrading?

Thanks!
 
In my not so humble opinion 256 MB of RAM is insufficient for any version of OS X on any Mac. You will see significant performance improvements all the way up to 512 or 640 MB with less significant improvements above there. The less physical RAM you have, the more use OS X will be forced to make of Virtual Memory and therefore the slower the operation.

Panther has some major improvements in Virtual Memory management over Jaguar so it would follow that Panther would show more improvement in performance on Macs with less physical RAM.

In short, add more RAM and upgrade to Panther. But that is only one man's opinion.
 
256MB is enough but not great. I have Panther on my iMac G4800 with 768MB ram. Runs great. The ram is not that expensive and its easy to upgrade.
 
This becomes more of an issue when dealing with a powerbook. My powerbook as 512MB and that RAM is very expensive. I have no plans on upgrading the memory on that machine, luckily Panther runs fine on it.

I did see a speed increase with the installation of Panther (from Jaguar)... but I don't think either OS would run as well with just 256MB of RAM.
 
Thanks for the info. I think I'll install Panther and see how it goes and expect to be buying more RAM soon after!
 
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