Ticket Options

Question Details

TICKET ARCHIVE -> Should I Get Tiger 10.4.3 For My Emac?

jgregorie - Nov 16, 2005 - 3:05 pm

i have an emac running osx version 10.2.8
it has a G4 1GHz processor and 640 MB of ram.

i have had the computer for a little over 2 years now and i love it. its given me little to no problems

i use it for home business doing graphic design mainly in illustrator and photoshop CS. the graphic side of it works great but im running into some problems with my version of safari.

i only have osx version 10.2.8 and there for cannot upgrade to the newer version of safari. this is becomeing a problem as i use my yahoo webmail acount as my primary email.my old version of safari is haveing trouble opening my yahoo acount and i also cannot fully use my gmail acount either because i dont have a fully soported browser.

if i upgrade my operating system to tiger 10.4.3 will this help me with my email situation? also can my computer handle that operating system? i have heard it eats up alot of memory?

thanks for your help

James

ishan - Nov 16, 2005 - 3:14 pm

You have enough RAM to handle Tiger, although 1 GB would be nice to get (and it's pretty cheap now). You will definitely see an improvement in Safari performance in many respects with 10.4.3. Before you do the update (if you decide to do it) please, please back up all your important files to an external drive. Ideally, you should make a clone of your existing drive onto an external drive using freeware such as Carbon Copy Cloner or Superduper (shareware). This way, if something awful happens, you have an identical replica of your existing setup which is bootable. Remember that OS X cannot boot from drives connected via USB, so any external drive you get for this (or have already) has to be connected to your eMac via firewire. Prices for external FW drives are quite reasonable now (I don't know how big your internal hard drive in your eMac is). Check reputable sites like dealmac.com for price comparisons or try a vendor like OWC (macsales.com). OWC has always given be excellent service and support, as has wiebetech.com. Just make sure that if you elect to go this route, that you buy a drive with FW on it (FW800 is compatible with FW400 on your eMac).

HTH and please let us know what happens. I just don't want to have you have problems with a nonessential update without a bootable backup. Have fun!

jgregorie - Nov 17, 2005 - 3:50 pm

Hello ishan

i have a lacie 160 gig fire wire external hardrive.i have backed up all my files onto it. my emac only has a 80 gig hard drive.

when i install tiger do you think i will have problems connecting to the lacie drive? when i first got it i had to partition the hard drive in order for my computer to recognize it.

i have all the disks for my programs, scanner and printer

do you think i will have problems finding drivers for my printer and scanner?

when i do install tiger what could be lost in terms of files or programs?

also when i do buy the tiger box set would it be beneficial to do a clean system reinstall using the original software disk that came with my computer and then install tiger or is that not necessary ?

thanks
james

ishan - Nov 17, 2005 - 5:26 pm

There's been problems with LaCie FW drives in general, but 10.4.3 won't make it any worse. I would do an archive/install of Tiger and save all your user preferences and settings (check the box that gives you that choice). That way, most of your settings will be unchanged (for some reason, for me, my printer disappears, and I have to add it again to the list, but the drivers are still there). All your old System files will be kept in a folder on your root directory called "Previous System" so nothing is really deleted, just inactivated. Hang on to that folder until you are sure everything's working right.

I wouldn't do a clean system reinstall and then add Tiger unless you really really want to reinstall all your third party apps from scratch. That's not a bad thing to do, but takes a very long time. It's certainly an option, and the purist way of doing things, so I can't say not to do it, but...you get the point.

HTH and have fun!