running OS X on older macs -- good idea?

[stultus]

I don't know anything about macs.

Our lab has a number of old macs (G3s, imacs) that we're in the middle of upgrading from OS 9.x to 10.3. Is this a Good Idea? My question is to find out whether thsi new OS is fundamantally different (i.e., faster, better, stronger) than 9.x.

My only comparison to PCs is upgrading from, say, 98 to XP, in which case putting XP on an old machine is not a good idea.

Anyone have anything to say?

 

[drag]

It's slower then OS 9 on the same hardware, but it's more stable. Plus you can do more things with it.

OS X is a much better os then OS 9. But it does require more resources, turn off all the eye candy and optimize stuff were you can.

I've run 10.2 on older g3 and some of them are a pain in the butt. The old gray towers with the zip drives, some of them were a huge pain.. The older ones, I think they were the ones with the slot for the zip drive vs the ones that had the face open... which ever ones were older. The SCSI wasn't handled properly and screwed things up.

But the blue-green g3's should be fine, and the newer gray towers will work fine too.

I wouldn't install them on machines with low amounts of memory, though. At least 128megs, ideally 256megs or more. That's the biggest performance issue IMO. Also you'd want at least a 5gig harddrive. 3gigs are doable, but less then that and your going to be running out of room fairly quickly after a install.

I figure that any machine with 400mhz or faster with a 256megs ought to handle OS X decently. However it's possible that 10.3 dropped support for many older macs, so maybe 10.2 would be a better idea, I am not sure about that.

 

[GonzoDaGr8]

98 to XP, in which case putting XP on an old machine is not a good idea.

No, Not usually a good idea, But XP on an older machine will still be a ton faster than OSX on any G3 machine. Any G3 can runOSX, But it ain't pretty. OSX is not very well(if at all) optimized for the hardware and makes the GUI feel and run sluggish. And yes, I am talking about this from experience.