Chosen Solution
Due to having just 800Mhz of processor speed, I run my iBook G4 on Tiger, 10.4.11. I realise that tiger is starting to get old so I was hoping that people might be able to recommend some safe, free mods for Tiger to spruce it up a little. Even cool open-source software suggestions welcome.
Thanks for all the replies, if anyone else has this question, here is a summary of the good answers: Super Duper, Time Machine equivalent Firefox, Safari equivalent Virtua Desktops, Spaces equivalent And for lots more click here
I would recommend Super Duper for backups. http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/S… It’ll add functionality like Time Machine to !0.4 and to be frank thats the biggest feature missing.
You could switch to Firefox for your browser, as Safari probably won’t be updated further for Tiger. - http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/fir… VirtueDesktops gives you Spaces functionality - http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/165… Is there anything in particular you are looking for?
you can try to do a non-native leopard installation, just put the hard drive in a mac that can install leopard, than install it, once it’s done, you can put the drive in the ibook. leopard will boot regardless of the hardware, as long as it has enough ram. i did this on my 733Mhz G4, and leopard even reads the procesor speed, as 733Mhz, and it runs anyway. there are also tools that allow you to install it and bypass the specs. leopard is the last PowerPC-Compatible mac os, so there should be a lot of support for it in the future, compared to tiger.
You might check out this site for software for older, slower Macs. Ralph http://mac.oldapps.com/
On the topic of non-native OS support. There is a tool out there that I remember reading about that will temporarily change the “processor speed” to make it compatible with leopard. I put that in quotes because it doesn’t actually change it, but rather, it changes the cpu report in the NVRAM(? I believe), so that you may fool the Leopard OS disk into installing onto a Mac that runs slower than the 867mhz Leopard minimum. I cannot remember where I saw this tool, but I would recommend googling it and checking the Hackintosh forums. Beyond that, max out the RAM, inquire about a HD upgrade, keep your login items to a minimum and clean the computer regularly.
