I've got a old iMac G3 400mhz 384MB Memory, which i brought simply to get used to an OS X system which 'just worked' before I pay £900 for a MacBook.

Now it's only 400mhz but I was wondering if anyone knows (from experience or directly reading about something similar) which out of 10.3 or 10.4 would run faster and by how much?

A lot of people have said 10.3 but it does sound like they just think that would make sense and so say so rather than actually knowing.

I just need to pick one soon and try and stick with it so if you guys could throw in some experiences it would be great.

Im pretty sure 10.3 will run faster, and it will take up less HDD space

it makes sense that 10.3 will work better, but there are lots of imac g3's running 10.4 @my school

How fast do they run?

300-600

The 600Mhz G3 is better at running 10.3.9 than it is at running 10.4.9. The hardware support is not all there for 10.4.9. The graphics card does not supprt all fancy 10.4.x stuff. 10.3.9 has a smaller footprint.

The main question is really the "by how much" part because I'm sure you need to sacrifice some features when you drop to 10.3 from 1.4 and just need to know that the extra speed increase is worth the drop.

Also the main difference I've noticed between 10.4 and 10.3 is that 10.4 has Dashboard.
Also a weird thing I noticed is that apple update takes only a few minutes on 10.4 whereas it takes like 10-20minutes on 10.3 to update the same applications. . Could not figure out why.

Anyone know what the other differences between 10.3 and 10.4 are (and noticed the apple update issue)?
Also the "by how much" part too please.

I've actually read that 10.3 runs way better than 10.4 on a machine like yours. I recently acquired a 366mhz iBook (Clamshell/Firewire) with around 384mb ram aswell, and I was using 10.3 for a few months, after actually taking the risk to do a clean install to 10.4 and upgrade it all the way to 10.4.9.

Now, everything works like a charm. The only thing that's too slow to "enjoy" is the dashboard. But Expose, iTunes, Safari, you name it, all works.

EDIT: Also, a lot of software these days seem to require 10.4, so that was one of the reasons I upgraded. I didn't really notice any major speed change when comparing 10.3 and 10.4 though.

10.3 was SCREAMINGLY fast to me compared with 10.2 or 10.4

I've had 10.4 running on a Blueberry iMac G3 400 MHZ, with 320MB RAM, since Tiger came out. I say if you have the HD space, use Tiger for it.

Cool, thanks all. I'm going to start with 10.4 and maybe in the summer give give 10.3 a try for a week or two just to see the difference.

the power mac in my sig is pretty sluggish with 10.4.9 Server, but not lightening fast with 10.3.9