I have a Lombard 333mzh 384mb ram - 60G hdd

I have os 9.2.2 and Panther on it. Should I bother installing Tiger. I have done it before on an older HDD, just wondering what peoples opinions are.
I like to tinker, and dont' mind headaches as this machine is just for that.

curious what others think

I've installed it on a Lombard for my brother, I've haven't heard any complaints. Problem was getting it on the hard drive without a DVD drive, I just popped the HD into my firewire case and installed it that way.

Do you think it will be slower than Panther?
I know that Tiger is a more optimized OS and technically should run faster.

I upgraded my RAM and my HD on my old Lombard, but am limited with applications and drivers for it since I am using Mac OS 10.2.8 and I also have Tiger on my other Macs, so it helps for consistency of use to all be the same OS. I really would like to install Tiger on it, but my Lombard does not have a DVD drive & I purchased a Tiger DVD not the CD version. While I have an external USB/Firewire DVD-RW, the Lombard of course does not have Firewire and will not boot from USB. I do not have a SCSI DVD or HD anymore.

If I get a notebook to standard IDE adapter and connect it internally to the same IDE bus that the SuperDrive on my Dual G5 Power Mac is on, will that work and if so, will it install a G5 specific version of the OS that will not work in my Lombard? Also, I know the Lombard is not officially supported for installation from the standard Tiger install DVD, so do I have to create a special Tiger DVD that will not exclude it from installing on my Lombard in this manner as I would if I had a Lombard with a DVD driver (info on how to do this is on the internet) or if since I am installing it from a compatible machine will it once installed boot and work normally on my Lombard?

Any advice from those more knowledgeable than me would be greatly appreciated and would save me the time & aggravation of attempting a futile process! Thanks for the favour!

Having tinkered with a Lombard...

Panther works perfectly, and is as quick as Jaguar on a Lombard. Tiger will be a little slower, as there is more overhead in comparison to Panther.

Tiger normally is available on DVD only, although a CD version is available. I used the CD version for tinkering on the Lombard. Even with ample memory and ample hard drive space, Tiger lagged quite a bit when compared to Panther. More of the spinning beachball, and slower launch times on software. Since the Lombard lacks firewire, installing off of a USB CD will simply be the most painful experience of your life. Also, without Firewire, you will have to resort to Xpostfacto to get it to install.

And the Lombard does have a peculiar memory situation in that you can run 512MB of memory on it, but you can not install the OS with all of that memory. So I had to swap the memory out in order avoid an install crash (It will install on 320MB of memory, though depending on the exact revision level of the board, your mileage may vary). The other problem with a Lombard is that you will not be able to view DVDs because of the lack of a decoder chip. An add-on card was available at one time, perhaps one can be had on eBay or here.

But the Lombard that we are using here is working like a champion under Panther, even on a wireless connection it has very little lag or beachballing. And it does have excellent battery life; almost two and a half hours running wireless, and over four without wireless. Nice big screen as well. So I recommend Panther because it will be less hassle in the long run.

Tiger does work well on the next model up, the Pismo, which has firewire (but are still a very wanted machine out there)...

The continuing spread of inaccurate information.

Tiger will be faster and makes more effective use of limited RAM than Panther.

Enjoy - your only issue will be getting it installed if you do not have a DVD. That machine is easy to replace the drive in an if you are keeping it getting a faster bigger drive will be a real treat for cheap. Your RAM is fine for Tiger.

Each revision of OSX has been faster and the next one will blow you out of your socks.

I might try Panther if I had a CD of it, which I don't. Jaguar works OK, but was surprisingly NOT noticeably faster when I upgraded from 192 MB RAM to 512 MB! Plus, I cannot connect to either of my printers as the drivers do not support Jaguar. So I really would like to try Tiger on it. My original post posed the question of whether I could install it onto the laptop's hard drive when removed and connected to the IDE bus of my G5. Since the G5 has SATA drives in it, the only IDE bus is for the DVD. One obstacle I might run into in this is that the hard drive does not have jumpers for Master/Slave. I think I might just disconnect the internal DVD drive and use it's connector for the laptop drive and then use an external Firewire DVD drive to install Tiger from. I'm still not certain that this will work when installed back into my Lombard.

Any thoughts about this. I really don't want to waste my time as this sounds like a big hassle if it does not work.

Yes and No. The speed improvements are partly because Tiger puts some of the processing load onto the video card. On older laptops and G3 iMacs expect very little improvement except boot time which may be reduced by 50% or even more. Tiger requires more free disk space, a disadvantage with older smaller HDs.

Big killer is indexing. IF you are not routinely transferring large files to this computer, Tiger should be OK but only marginally faster than Panther. Just be sure you leave 2-3GBs free disk space.

BTW my early experiences with Tiger were that if I turned spotlight indexing off, I also killed the regular find file, forcing me to use Terminal for file searching. Did any of the post 10.4.4 updates cure this issue??? Personally I hated spotlight to the point that I reverted to my Panther install.

Not that I have ever seen. I have noted that the interface is slower, and yields more beachballing than under Panther. It is also quite a big bigger, which is a very real limit on smaller hard drives. Besides, in this case, Tiger will not install because of the lack of Firewire on the Lombard; unless one uses Xpostfacto. Running Tiger on 320MB of memory was painful, but it will not install on a Lombard that has 512MB installed in it.

I certainly was not "blown away" by Tiger, in fact, the new features continue to keep me away from converting to it. Spotlight is a metafile database piece of junkachev, but turning it off leaves Aqua without the regular Find. And I have never seen any use for the Dashboard, except to waste system resources and slow down my already ponderously slow Internet connection.

After having tried it, I would not recommend or bother running Tiger on any machine older than the Pismo, which actually will run Tiger because the Pismo was the first machine to have Firewire. Perhaps Tiger will run, but it will not be a very good experience vis a vis Panther on a Lombard.

I am already yawning at Leopard, which next to Spaces, offers nothing of interest to me. But this is from a person that only made the move from Jaguar to Panther because I could not stand Interblech Exploder anymore...

Adding memory will only speed up a machine if the software you are running uses the extra memory, and avoids the use of swapping. When I doubled the memory of my machine, I saw no speed increase until I had the machine do multiple rendering tasks. Instead of beachballing frequently (while it was swapping), it was able to do all of the work inside the available memory. In that case, what previusly took five minutes to render was sliced down to about a minute and a half. If you are running the OS straight up with normal tasks, you will not see a difference simply because adding memory does not make the CPU run any faster.

Well... If you disconnect the DVD and put in the HD, how would you be able to install Tiger from DVD? If you were able to install it onto the HD somehow, it would probably work in the Lombard. You could also do it with an external drive chassis, but the lack of Firewire means that you would not be able to boot the external drive on the Lombard. Your best method is to get a CD install of Tiger.

If the problem is printer drivers, you could try Gutenprint, or one of the many CUPS drivers. Upgrading to Panther would also fix the problem, since pretty much every manufacturer is still supporting Panther as well as Tiger. I ran into a number of little problems installing OSX on a Lombard, but none of them were serious and the machine is running perfectly right now, wireless and all.