Hee-hee, no X for you!

[MultiFinder]

I got really bored today, and tries playing around with stupidly low RAM amounts in my G4 (Gigabit Ethernet, dual 500MHz). It normally has 896 megs of RAM in it and runs 10.5.2 quite happily.

Trial 1: 256 megs of RAM. Leopard booted, slowly, and took its time loading in the UI after logging in. After that, it was okay-ish. Slow, but mostly usable.

Trial 2: 128 megs of RAM. Leopard booted, slowly, and then took a good two-three minutes loading in the UI after logging in. Pulling down a menu would cause disk thrashing, bringing up the Dock would cause disk thrashing, and don't even get me started on launching anything. Slow and horrible; think iPhone loading webpages over EDGE, but with one bar of signal. It was that bad

Trial 3: 64 megs of RAM. This was my favourite, by far. Stuck the 64 meg stick in there, poked the power button, and watched the Happy Mac come up and welcome me to OS 9.2 The poor thing was just like "No, mate, you dun wanna boot X on me with 64 megs of RAM. Here, try out OS 9." That's an awesome feature, but I really wanted to see Leopard on 64 megs of RAM. Ah well, looks like 128 is the lowest you can go.

So yeah, that's the result of my experiment. Any questions, comments, whatever?

 

[paws]

Amusing.

What happens if you don't have 9.2 on it?

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Hrm, I haven't tried OS X on 64 MB, but I have run 10.0 through 10.3 on 96 MB. (Even on 10.0, 128 MB was the "official" minimum.)

 

[MultiFinder]

What happens if you don't have 9.2 on it?

It boots to the blinking folder. It *really* doesn't seem to want to boot X on 64 megs.

 

[Christopher]

I ran 10.4 on 96MB once.

 

[MacMan]

Lowest I've ever had I think is 10.4 on 128MB, which is usable but only just.

 

[LCGuy]

I don't know about newer versions, but Jaguar (10.2) works on 32 MB. Its really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really not pretty though.

 

[Quadraman]

I ran 10.4 on 96MB once.

Tiger will get into 96mb. That is the absolute minimum. Older versions of OS X can run in less memory but with only 64 megs I wouldn't try running anything past 10.2, and that may not even work. I'm running 10.2 on my iMac G3 but that has 256 megs.

 

[Franklinstein]

My 2400c w/240MHz G3 upgrade runs 10.2.6 with 112MB of RAM. It's pretty responsive, actually, though I've never tried running more than one program at once. iTunes plays fine (no visuals, at least not with more than 1 fps), Firefox works, iChat works. It's not the world's fastest machine, but aside from the lack of battery status monitoring and sleep abilities, it's completely usable.

 

[OtakuMegane]

My 2400c w/240MHz G3 upgrade runs 10.2.6 with 112MB of RAM. It's pretty responsive, actually, though I've never tried running more than one program at once. iTunes plays fine (no visuals, at least not with more than 1 fps), Firefox works, iChat works. It's not the world's fastest machine, but aside from the lack of battery status monitoring and sleep abilities, it's completely usable.

10.2 is workable in that amount but 10.3 and up won't be. A barebones install of later versions chews up that much RAM all by itself, much less running any other applications.

 

[t3h]

Use OpenFirmware to set the RAM size yourself. Run it on 32MB

 

[SiliconValleyPirate]

I ran OS X 10.1 on a 604e/200 with 64MB of RAM. Talk about waiting on a miracle happening. It took about 4 hours to install, about 20 mins to boot... but once you got to the desktop it was steady but not all that bad, surprisingly. As long as you only ran 1 app at a time it was fine, and from rooting about in the terminal and enabling the Web Sharing and PHP, it was clear the underlying OS was running just fine it was just struggling with the desktop (which was all rendered in CPU at that stage, especially as it was running on a Rage 128).

 

[zerohour]

currently running OS X 10.2 8 on my G3 Wallstreet with 96Mb. Its no speed demon but it works

 

[gobabushka]

what happens if you set the startup disk to ur os x partition

 

[t3h]

http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1099.html

Read this (Reducing the size of Physical Memory in Open Firmware).

 

[benjgvps]

http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1099.html
Read this (Reducing the size of Physical Memory in Open Firmware).

Heh, with that in place, try to track down a 16 MB stick...

 

[Quadraman]

I ran OS X 10.1 on a 604e/200 with 64MB of RAM. Talk about waiting on a miracle happening. It took about 4 hours to install, about 20 mins to boot... but once you got to the desktop it was steady but not all that bad, surprisingly. As long as you only ran 1 app at a time it was fine, and from rooting about in the terminal and enabling the Web Sharing and PHP, it was clear the underlying OS was running just fine it was just struggling with the desktop (which was all rendered in CPU at that stage, especially as it was running on a Rage 128).

10.0 and 10.1 were notorious for their badness even under the best conditions of their day. OS X wasn't considered 'complete' by most Mac users until 10.2. I don't think I could even be bothered to hunt down a 10.0 or 10.1 disc today except maybe for nostalgia purposes. 10.2 can probably run in any machine that will run 10.0 or 10.1 anyway with just minor upgrading at most and is a much better OS. Many hardware drivers and a lot of software don't support older than 10.2 anyway so it's kind of useless to keep using the older versions.