I have a 1.6 GHz PowerMac G5 running Mac OS X 10.3.9 (Panther). Earlier this year, the Safari browser was not supported as 10.3.9 is "old". I have recently bought 2GB of RAM, so the total is now 2.25GB, but this has done nothing to improve the operation or speed, as I thought it would. If I bought Leopard, would that improve things? I hope to keep my Mac for a few more years.
Peter Medhurst
The PowerMac G5 was an advanced and relatively powerful 64-bit tower system when it was unveiled in August 2003 at £1,549, but it is coming towards the end of its life. Apple has stopped supporting "Mac Classic" (OS 9) and will stop supporting machines with PowerPC chips, like yours, having moved to Intel. Upgrading to Leopard would provide some useful extra features, and should help prolong its useful life. Leopard has had five upgrades in less than a year -- it's already up to 10.5.5 -- so most early problems should have been fixed. However, I'm very surprised that adding 2GB of memory did not give a noticeable performance boost (did you check the RAM was recognised?), and I would expect to see performance reduced with Leopard. One solution would be to partition your hard drive and have a different operating system (Panther and Leopard) on each partition. You could do this with software such as iPartition or DriveGenius.
You can, of course, continue to use Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) until the hardware breaks down, as long as your existing applications continue to do what you need. However, you may not be able to get some new functions that you would like.
Backchat: Karl Smith says: "If [Peter] can get hold of a copy, Tiger (10.4) may well be a better bet." He also reckons installing a faster hard drive would help. Rhodri Jones says: "I have the same model of G5 with 2GB of RAM. I upgraded to Leopard and noticed a very good increase in speed with the apps I use. No problem running Safari -- or Firefox, my preferred browser." For other old Mac owners: Leopard does not support PowerPC G3 processors, or G4 processors with clock speeds below 867MHz.
